text:
LF: Yes, that is about right.
VKM: What was your background in garden and landscape?
LF: My background in garden and landscape was practically non-existent. I had never lived anywhere that had a garden, and I loved a beautiful garden when I saw one. But I had never studied gardening. My background was as a reference librarian. I had done my undergraduate work in General Studies at the University of Chicago, taken a master's degree in library science, and I worked as a reference librarian at the University of Chicago until 1961, when we moved to Washington. And then I worked again in a very general collection at the U.S. Information Agency, which in those days – it no longer exists, it's been folded into the State Department – but it's job was essentially to do public relations for the United States worldwide. We ran the Voice of America. We had a large publishing collection – publishing operation rather – that we distributed materials very, very widely. And the library here was a backup. It was like a good small university library, or maybe more like a college library with a very up-to-date collection – we collected newspaper clippings daily that would prepare us to answer questions from abroad and publish things about the states that people wanted to know. I did that for about ten years. But in work as a librarian, you begin to understand the importance of little things that most people ignore, like punctuation and consistency in bibliographic citation. And when I – well, things changed at the U.S. Information Agency during the Vietnam War and it became less interesting to me. I had a background – I'd done some editorial work at the University of Chicago for the press there, and my husband was traveling a lot. I just decided I didn't want to go to an office five days a week. And so I stopped my library work in the '60s and started doing copyediting, and that's what brought me to Dumbarton Oaks.
VKM: So, how did you first become aware of Dumbarton Oaks?
LF: Well, I – we had a good friend named Bates Lowry. I should go back. You can't live in Washington and not be aware of Dumbarton Oaks. My husband and I had subscribed to the concerts; I had walked frequently in the gardens here. It was a gorgeous place and a place I was drawn back to. But in 1977, a friend of ours named Bates Lowry, who was an architectural historian, came here. He had a project at that time; he and his wife were doing some publishing of microfiche in American art and architecture. He subsequently became very interested in the preservation at the Pension Building downtown, which today is the Building Museum, and he ultimately became the first director and really organizer of the Building Museum. But I think in '77 he was still working at something called the Dunlap Society. Anyway, he was an old college friend of my husband's. They moved down here, and I can't remember at this point whether that was about the time that Betty MacDougall came to Dumbarton Oaks, or whether she was already here.
VKM: I think she started around '72, so –
LF: Okay, then she was here. But, Bates knew her. They were good friends. And through Bates Lowry, I met Betty MacDougall. My husband and I met her, and we became friendly. And she knew what I was doing. I had at that point just finished five years editing the rare book catalogue of the Lessing Rosenwald Rare Book Collection for the Library of Congress, which was a very demanding assignment. But I had finished it, I'd finished the indexes, I'd done the bibliography, it was at press, and I was looking for other assignments. Betty was about to reissue a symposium on Persian gardens that had been held here, I guess in the early '60s. And I think it was out of print. She wanted to have it reprinted, and she hired me to do that job.
VKM: So, you had already seen Dumbarton Oaks before you came to work here. So when you first saw Dumbarton Oaks, or visited, what were your initial impressions of it?
LF: Oh, I was awed. It was very very beautiful and it was – well, one of the joys of having this assignment was that I got into the gardens when they were not necessarily open, and I could wander at leisure. I was – as I recall – I wasn't working by the hour, so I had time to take breaks and enjoy the gardens, and I had met Mrs. Bliss once.
VKM: Really?
LF: Yes, she was an old lady, but when we first interned – '61 – she was still on the scene, and not that I had any long conversation with her, but it was kind of fun to be in her home and see what she had created. At that time – and at this point I don't know to what extent things have changed – but the garden operation, the garden library, and the exhibition space for the rare book collection were all right here, sort of on the 32nd Street side, and the library was on two levels, the rare books were on the street level and the working collections – the working gardening collections – were underground, down that circular staircase, that you may have seen. Much of my work was done at home because, as I remember it, on the first project, which was the Persian Gardens, I didn't see it until the galley stage. Now that may not be familiar to someone who has grown up with a computer. But publishing in those days was – there were many parts to it. A manuscript would come in. It would be edited. It would be sent to a printer who would then type in the printed text. It would come back in a first stage of prints, which were called galleys. It wasn't divided into pages; it was just, you know, line by line. They would be edited and proofread. The manuscript would already have been proofread, but then the galleys would be proofed. Corrections would be made. They would go back to the printer. The corrections would be made, and then the text would come back again in page proof form. You would have to correct – you would have to check that all the corrections had been made, and then at that point any indexing could be done because there would be page numbers related to the text. So you would prepare an index at that point, if there was to be one. And it would then go back to the press. If I remember correctly, I wasn't around for anything until the galleys came back because I think a copy of the first edition would have been sent to the printer for resetting in type. Oh, and I should also answer that the joy was – I did have to work at home mostly – but when I came in, I could sit at an absolutely gorgeous desk in the garden library, which looked out on the gardens and it really felt good.
VKM: So, you worked on the Persian Garden.
LF: That was the first publication.
VKM: What were your other projects?
LF: Well, following that – I don't know if it is still the case, I think it is, but the garden library, the garden – I shouldn't just say library – but the gardening section of Dumbarton Oaks. I can't remember exactly what it's called.
VKM: I think they call it Garden and Landscape studies now.
LF: Okay, the Garden and Landscape Studies section would hold an annual symposium, and the papers from that symposium would be published, which again added to the length of time. Papers would come in. The authors would be told that six months later they were supposed to have final copy. They would have delivered them orally at this symposium. Then they were supposed to submit a final typed version of their papers. Some of them would come. Some of them wouldn't come. It was always a struggle. But probably within six months or so, they would have all appeared. Betty would have decided what order they should appear in. She would, probably by then, have written a forward of some sort, organized it, asked for any major substantive changes that she might have wanted. She might have asked an author to elaborate on some subject. And then, they would come to me – the manuscripts – at that point, after, not Persian Gardens, I think the next one was the sixth colloquium, which was on John Claudius Loudon and the nineteenth century in Great Britain, and at that point I had manuscripts and I would change them for punctuation, spelling. Again, because it was a different world, there was no such thing as spell-check.
VKM: Oh, I can imagine!
LF: And even today, with spell-check, you have to check because "to" is a very different word from "too." But in those days, the authors would've type their own manuscripts because they were all academics and they didn't have secretaries. And some of them could type, and some of them couldn't. And typewriters did not make corrections, so the corrections were either made in whiteout or by hand by the authors, before the manuscript would come here – some of them legible, some of them not. And it was my job at that point as a copy editor not only to check for spelling and punctuation and correct grammar, in some cases – because often, not often but sometimes, the authors were foreign and there would be rather awkward translations. But I had to get the manuscript in shape to go for that first stage of typesetting, and I did that for the John Claudius Loudon Colloquium, which finally was published in 1980. And I'll tell you about another publication that came out in 1980 later, because I want to talk about two of them together, but also the Roman Gardens which came out in 1981. In between I did Beatrix Farrand's Plant Book for Dumbarton Oaks, but that was a very different publication from the symposium – from the colloquium. And then again I worked on the Beatrix Farrand colloquium in 1982. On the Beatrix Farrand books, what I did was more substantive.
VKM: So who did you work with the most during your time at Dumbarton Oaks?
LF: Betty MacDougall, who essentially was my boss. She was the fulltime person in charge of the garden and landscape research effort. I never quite understood it, but I think that at least at that point the staff members here had faculty appointments at Harvard – they may still. I don't know. She was something like an adjunct professor. She was a very distinguished landscape and architectural historian. I should say architectural historian – I guess in those days – with a specialty in landscape architecture. Italian gardens were her great specialty. Betty was the fulltime person here. She supervised the librarian, Laura Byers, with whom I worked a lot because I had to check references and things down in the reference library. Betty would have, I gather, made any acquisitions of rare books at that point. Although, I think, I don't know how much money was left in those days.
VKM: Not very much.
LF: Once Mrs. Bliss died – actually once the property was transferred to Harvard – the rare book library may have stopped making additions.
VKM: I think what basically happened was they had to sell the books that weren't related to the gardens in order to afford to buy new books.
LF: Could be. I don't know that. I had never heard that. So that could have been a later development.
VKM: It was. There was a lot of stuff in the records about how Harvard felt about Dumbarton Oaks selling books that maybe weren't related to their collection, but Harvard wanted.
LF: Oh that's very possible. Yes, but I would imagine that the rare books related to the gardens –
VKM: – Oh, those they kept.
LF: Those they kept. The others might have been sold, if they were duplicates from Harvard, or gone up to the Harvard libraries. Yes, I think, it's my impression that for all three of the studied collections, the books, rare books even, related to those collections remained here, because they were certainly shelved in the garden library here and exhibited in that entrance – in that long hallway leading to the garden library doors, just as you came in the 32nd street entrance, where they are exhibited today. Betty would have supervised all of that, anything having to do with the – ah, the garden – oh, but not the gardens themselves. That was a totally different operation. There was a gardener on staff and of course a large staff of gardeners, and he had charge of the gardens. He might have used the library, although I rather doubt it. But, by then those were two entirely separate departments, and that's where the Beatrix Farrand Plant Book comes in.
VKM: Can you talk about any changes that took place in 1980 when Diane McGuire took over while Betty was on sabbatical?
LF: Yes, and that's exactly where the plant book comes in, and – Diane McGuire was a landscape designer, landscape architect. She was not an academic. She was a hands-on designer and gardener. She was also an ardent feminist. Feminist – Feminism as a movement was really blossoming just about that time. There were a lot of women in the landscape architect profession interested in the history of women in the profession, and Beatrix Farrand was the first. She had been, I don't know, should I talk about her background; who she was?
VKM: Beatrix Farrand? Sure.
LF: Yes, Beatrix Farrand.
VKM: I'd be curious to know how much was, you know, common awareness, when because –
LF: No, I mean this, the original research, or most of the major research on Beatrix Farrand was done here at Dumbarton Oaks, and subsequent to the symposium – colloquium. I keep calling it symposium. Sorry about that.
VKM: I get them mixed up too.
LF: Correct the record, please – colloquium. Diane came in. I can't remember whether she came as a fellow or exactly what. I don't remember the order in which she was actually employed here. But Diane's interest was in the Dumbarton Oaks gardens and in Beatrix Farrand, who had designed the Dumbarton Oaks gardens. Beatrix Farrand was a very, very interesting person. She was the first major female landscape architect in this country. She came from a very prominent old New York family. She was Beatrix Jones Farrand and the "Jones" was always part of her signature. The Joneses in New York were the sort of family that looked down on the Astors as nouveau-riche. Beatrix's father was a Jones of that family. His name was something Cadwalader Jones. These were all New York Dutch and English names. Her mother was an interesting person in her own right. Henry James was one of her mother's closest friends. She had a kind of salon in New York. The parents separated when Beatrix was twelve, and I think that may have had something to do with Beatrix's independence of mind, growing up with a mother who didn't have a lot of money anymore. She had enough to live on properly in New York. But she grew up sort of in that salon, meeting a lot of very interesting people. In the Beatrix Jones Colloquium – there it is – there is a biographical section on Beatrix, and it talks about her background. She – now we're talking now about the 1880s, '90s – she may have been born earlier; I don't remember the birth date. But like girls of her societal rank, she was homeschooled. She never went to college. But growing up in her mother's salon, she was well-read. She must have been a good listener, I think. She was certainly brought up with all of the manners that would be required to deal with high society, wherever she went. And I think I failed to mention that her father's sister was Edith Wharton. Edith Wharton was also well-connected and was also, as you may know if you've read any of her history, a very independently-minded woman. She took a great interest in her niece, who was considerably younger, and they were always very close, and indeed Farrand was her executor, after Edith Wharton's death. At some point, long after the father had left – Beatrix must have been in her late teens – I think I remember reading somewhere that she actually had a coming-out party, which I'm not sure of. I may be wrong about that. But anyway, at some point she was sent, and I made a note here, she was introduced to Charles Sprague Sargent, who was a horticulturist and was at that point the either coming or already director of the Arnold Arboretum in – outside Boston. She was sent up to study with him, to apprentice – although they probably would not use such a low-class term. But she was sent up to work with him, and he took a great interest in her, and she apparently fell in love with plants and planting and really took a great interest in it and was a prized student of his. But at some point, probably under her aunt's influence, instead of following Sargent, who was basically a horticulturist – he was interested in how plants worked, in naming plants, in the relationships of plants and plantings in a kind of wild landscape. Meanwhile Beatrix had done some traveling, mostly in Italy, where Wharton was living, and had been introduced by her aunt, who was interested in interior decoration and garden design, to the great Italian gardens, and at that point, I think, Beatrix realized that what she wanted to be was a designer of gardens, not a horticulturist. She began her career and was the first female member of the American – I think it's called – the American Society of Landscape Architects. She was the one woman accepted by all these men, who were designing gardens in those days, like Fredrick Law Olmsted and a number of others whose names just escape me at the moment. But anyway, they invited her to join them in founding this society. So, Diane, who was very interested in gardens, as a designer was also interested in Beatrix Farrand's history. She came here, I think she may have been assigned, and I'm not sure of this, it would have to be checked. She may have been sent down by Harvard to work with the gardener because in 1970 or before, she was familiar with Beatrix Farrand's Plant Book for Dumbarton Oaks. The Plant Book had been requested, I think, and it's somewhere here in these books, but I'm not going to look for it now. It's in the introduction to the Plant Book. I believe Mrs. Bliss, at the time Dumbarton Oaks went over to Harvard –
VKM: I read the introduction. I think it was William Tyler, maybe, who asked her to write up –
LF: Maybe it was Tyler –
VKM: – all the plants she had in the garden
LF: Right. He asked her, probably employed her, to go through section by section of the gardens explaining what her vision had been for that particular garden; how it related to the house, and then list the plants that she had proposed, because even by 1940 some changes had been made, during the war I'm sure the gardens had been neglected – everything else in this country had been neglected. Those were hard times. They wanted a record which hadn't been here when she could come annually and oversee and work with Mrs. Bliss on the gardens and work with the gardener. And at that point she had prepared a plant book, which existed in manuscript and manuscript only. Diane, working with it and working with the gardeners here, realized that it was a valuable document, and she was very eager to have it published. And she – I guess she must have persuaded Betty to hire me to help her bring out that manuscript, because Diane wasn't used to writing a lot and this was a pretty – what should I say – Farrand wasn't a writer. I mean, Farrand gave directions usually orally, or notes, and this was not something that was ready for publication. So, it was much more substantial from my point of view. I really worked on the text, and then Diane taught me, bless her, to identify the – and not just identify – but correct for or research for correctness the plant names and link them up with the popular plant names, because the plant names were give in Latin usually. Sometimes in the text they would be in popular form, and to know the relationship and be sure that it was accurately depicted was a big part of the job, which I really enjoyed. I learned a lot from that particular – I learned from all the assignments – but I learned a great deal about gardening from that one. And then, I would – I can't remember exactly the dates of Diane's coming in and substituting for Betty, but Diane also took responsibility for the colloquium on Beatrix Farrand, and I worked very closely with her on that. And, indeed, I think I am given credit on the title page of that one. We had a good time. Well I met her friends and by then I was really interested in Farrand, so I really – I loved doing that book. I subsequently visited as many gardens of hers as I could, and it turned out that she had been the original landscape designer for the University of Chicago, where I had gone to school – something I had never known. But Diane was here and while she was working on the colloquium, she had – she was very very keen to see the gardens returned to the state that Farrand had left them – that they had been on Farrand's last visit. She wanted them returned to where they had been designed. Well, over the years there've been many different gardeners, many changes made, that beautiful Italian pool, reflecting pool, had been added. Diane always said that Farrand would have been very upset to have seen that happen. But, and of course that could not be removed at that point. But, Farrand had – Farrand – well first of all there was no air conditioning when Dumbarton Oaks was built. There was no such thing as an air conditioned interior. This house was designed for – to be lived in and entertained in by the Blisses in the spring and the fall. They would take residence here in those seasons and do a lot of entertaining, and the gardens, as envisioned by Farrand, were an addition to the house in which entertaining would take place. So, as you may have noticed, as they move away from the house, they get more and more wild, but near the house they are quite formal, almost like rooms. And I'm sure tables would have been set up and entertaining would have been done in many of those rooms, and Diane was very conscious of that, made me conscious of it, and, I think, tried to make the gardeners increasingly conscious of that, and tried to bring the landscape as much as possible back to where they had been. I don't know how the gardener at that point felt about Diane. I'm sure there were conflicts. I don't know if Giles Constable is still around, but if there were conflicts, he would be able to tell you about those. Diane would sometimes grumble. The gardener was never anything but nice to me, but I hadn't of course – there were – Harvard was paying for all of this and I don't know how Harvard felt about it all, but if Diane had had her way and unlimited funds, the gardens would have been returned to Farrand's plan, and were returned to a certain degree, I have no doubt. I can't tell you specifically how much. But and – again that was what 19 – she was here in '80 –
LF: The book came out in '82, with again the same process of reading it, the proofs and all of that. But what – it's thirty years – the gardens today – I would have to go through these gardens with the plant book to tell you whether they still reflect Farrand's plan or not. I imagine they do, fairly close up. I know that the number of major trees that were fundamental to her plan, that had been preserved from the eighteenth century, maybe early nineteenth century, and on which she had focused various views came down in various storms over the years, subsequent to this work. And I hope that they have been replaced at least by the same kind of tree. But, they can't possibly be at the same height and majesty that they were when Dumbarton Oaks was at its height, in the Blisses' days. But I imagine that the gardeners have worked with the plant book now that it is published and have probably followed as much as possible the plan. Anyway, the Beatrix Farrand colloquium was the last book that I edited here at Dumbarton Oaks. Yes, very shortly after that, I think – well I was told – whether I was fired for cause, whether I was fired because there wasn't any money anymore, I don't know. I was told the latter.
VKM: I think they were a little short on funds.
LF: Simply that they were short of funds, that they were no longer – that they no longer had funds to pay for editing these things. They were going to hold the authors responsible for seeing that their text was clean, and I suppose Betty must have read the proofs after those years, and I've never looked at them to see if I felt they needed editing. But my formal connection with Dumbarton Oaks ended at that point. I should say that I went on to do some work with Betty, with Diane, who edited a book called – or was instrumental in putting out a book called Beatrix Farrand's American Landscapes, which has a big section, as you can imagine, on Dumbarton Oaks, and I edited that book when it came out in 1985. So that is really my last formal connection. Anything else you want to ask me?
VKM: Did you say that there was the Beatrix Farrand Colloquium? Did you attend it?
LF: Oh yes, of course. I attended all the colloquiums that I edited except Persian Gardens, which – I was young. It was the year – actually it was just the year before I came to Washington. But I attended all three colloquiums that I edited. That was always very pleasant. It meant – people would come from all over the country. They all were delighted to see one another because there aren't that many people – professors – interested in landscape architecture. It's still – I imagine it's still a fairly small group and they know one another, and they were thrilled to come. We would have lunch in the gardens, a boxed lunch of some kind, and there were cocktail parties and the papers obviously were delivered, and then there would be question and answer sessions, and that was one reason why the authors went back following the colloquium because often points were raised that they wanted to elaborate on. So, it was a genuinely scholarly meeting and – but it was lovely. Usually your scholarly meetings are at universities in the basement of the library, and to come to Dumbarton Oaks was a very special treat.
VKM: This is maybe a strange question, but you mentioned that Diane McGuire was still very feminist, and there were – I mean, I've noticed that there're a lot of women who worked in garden and landscape studies here, but not so many of the junior fellows were women. It was very male dominated in the records. Did you ever get a feeling that –
LF: The world was male dominated until about 19 – let's face it, today women still get paid less, not at universities, I am happy to say, but I have watched a tremendous change in the way women are regarded in the world. Let's face it, Beatrix Farrand would not have been the success she was without her social background. A lot of the women who pushed in the early days – women writers. You know, George Eliot was not that woman's name. The Brontë sisters had to publish – one of them, I think, published under a man's name. Women didn't do things like that, professionally. Farrand had the advantage of a lot of very good social connections and her early work was paid for by friends of the family, who recognized her talent and who gave her the opportunities to work on their gardens, because she needed to make a living, until she married Max Farrand. But she – she could do that early pioneering work. In art history, generally, and architectural history, I'm sure most of the professors at the universities were male, if you start looking at bibliographies. I suspect that they were not awfully interested in gardening; that it was thought of as a woman's – something the woman did. The man designed the house; maybe the lady of the house designed the gardens or worked on the gardens. So, I would guess that women probably – and I am really talking off the top of my head here – but probably entered academia working on gardens, before men did. Women might take a degree in art history and then study Italian gardens, which meant you had to do your graduate work in Italy. I'm sure that that's what took Betty over there. I mean, she loved Italy. But her good friend here, Hank Millon, who ran the National Gallery's Studies program for years – Hank studied sculpture and not gardens. I'm sure that that's what attracted a lot of women to the profession, and over the years of these colloquiums, when you got distinguished professors, distinguished academics, there would have been more women in this profession than men. Now, I think younger men probably don't even think twice about it. They don't think of it as a woman's profession, which would mean that there would be more fellows today – male – more than thirty years ago.
VKM: You mentioned that you used to attend events here, even before you worked here. Was there – did you do a lot of socializing with people who had worked here at Dumbarton Oaks?
LF: Not a lot. My husband was, in those years, curator of prints and then Chief of the Prints and Photographs division at the Library of Congress. I'm trying to think how we met Mr. Tyler, whether he did research over there, whether we met here. The art world here was much smaller in those days, than it is today. Many museums didn't exist. My husband ended his career as Director of the Portrait Gallery. There was no such thing until the Johnson administration, until the late '60s. I remember meeting Tyler and being invited here to concerts by him. But I don't remember the particulars of how it happened. It probably happened through my husband. So, I didn't pay attention. We subscribed at one point to the concert series here, and that was lovely. It would be held in the music room, and would spill out at intermission onto the terrace in the gardens, and that was very special. What I honestly don't remember is whether that was before or after I worked here. So, I'd have to check in your records as to when the concert series began.
VKM: You know, I actually don't know.
LF: It was an invitational. You had to wangle an invitation to subscribe, and I imagine Mr. Tyler arranged that for us. And it may have been at one of those concerts that I met Mrs. Bliss. It's very possible because I don't remember her coming to any of these colloquia. But I honestly can't tell you.
VKM: I think the colloquia started after she died, so –
LF: Very possible, yes.
VKM: This is maybe a funny question, but someone mentioned that Dumbarton Oaks used to be a part of the diplomatic social scene.
LF: Oh, of course!
VKM: Was that still going on while –
LF: I mean, after all, it was built by a wealthy diplomat, and in those days diplomacy was very different. At the highest levels of the diplomatic posts, and still to a certain extent – but in those days the posts were filled by people not only with money, but with social connections; good family from usually the east coast. Today, because so much of the entertaining has to be paid for by the ambassador, the government has very small budgets, they'll pick wealthy people who made their own money. But in those days, it was old family, and the diplomatic community was very socially elite. I would say a lot of diplomats lived in Georgetown. Georgetown was the place to live if you had social connections, when we moved here in 1961. It still is to a certain extent, although there's – it's diversified a lot, as the whole world has diversified. But I'm sure that when the Blisses' entertained personally, a great part of their – a great many of their friends would have served in diplomatic posts, not just as ambassadors, but as chiefs of mission. Many would be ambassadors coming to this country from countries where Mr. Bliss had – where Ambassador Bliss had served. I'm sure he kept up his connections abroad. He would have welcomed new ambassadors. I can't remember now where he served. But there had to be Latin American ones because that is where he developed his interest in the pre-Columbian part. I didn't do my homework on the Blisses. But oh yes, I mean it would have been a center for entertaining in the diplomatic community. You could probably check that out just looking at the social pages of the Washington Post during the Bliss years. I'm sure those pages – those parties were covered, probably with guest lists, at least of the most important guests
VKM: Did they still have parties and stuff in the '70s when it was just a Harvard institution?
LF: Well, the parties would be in conjunction with the colloquia. I can't tell you about the Byzantine and the pre-Columbian. Have you spoken with Betty Benson?
VKM: I'm mostly doing garden and landscape. But, I believe someone has.
LF: That's good. I'm sure that they had parties. As I say, there was the whole entertaining in conjunction with the concerts. I think the director entertained. I would not be surprised if the director entertained Harvard graduates. And I'm sure it was – you know you entertain to raise money, let's face it. Dumbarton Oaks was, as I understood it – if it couldn't raise its own, enough money to run it, it was going to revert entirely to Harvard and folded into Harvard. The collections would be folded into the Harvard collections. For all I know, the building would be sold, the building and gardens. I don't know that. I have not read the documents. But it was always my understanding that Dumbarton Oaks had to stand on its own two feet in terms of budget.
VKM: Yes, I mean –
LF: And believe me, maintaining these gardens costs a lot of money. And the endowment in those days – and it's even like the Phillips today. I'm sure when Mr. Phillips left his money to the Phillips Collection, he thought that that would ground it in perpetuity. But inflation has been such that those early endowments just do not cover, and I am sure that Giles Constable had to raise money for Dumbarton Oaks, and there would have been parties entertaining people who wanted to support the house and gardens, in those years. And once Mrs. Bliss was dead and Harvard owned the collection – Harvard administered, they didn't own but they administered Dumbarton Oaks. I would guess that the guest list would change considerably.
VKM: Did you – I don't know the exact financial details of how Harvard related to Dumbarton Oaks, but did you get a sense of how people here felt about the threat of Harvard maybe taking –
LF: They were all aware of it, because that is where I heard about it – I would have no reason. You know, they paid me; I think the biggest job was $5,000, and mostly it was considerably less than that. Of course, when I was told that they were letting me go or that they couldn't employ me anymore, they didn't fire me, they just said next year we're not going to have an editor, and as far as I knew, they didn't. It was made clear to me that that was because they were strapped financially. I mean, not strapped – that's probably much too strong a word. But, they were having to watch their expenditures more than they had in previous years. Whether – I don't think that Betty MacDougall ever felt that she would lose her job. It may have affected her travel budget. That I don't know. She never spoke to me about that. She did travel. By the time – well we kept up our relationship until she died. But in the '80s, '90s she was on a number of UNESCO panels and international panels, and I'm sure that paid for much of her travel in those years. If she was still at Dumbarton Oaks when that happened, they were probably thrilled that somebody else was picking up the tab. But I don't know. She never spoke to me about feeling that she'd lose her job. But I know that there was a consciousness among the department heads, at least. And it may have happened that they may have had to have fewer and fewer fellows. There was entertaining incidentally for the fellows. Fellows all got free lunches. I don't know if they still do. The fellows – there were parties for the fellows. It was a very congenial situation, almost like a small college at Oxford, and Tyler was, I'm sure, very eager to keep it that way, which was great because they would all go from here out to colleges and universities all around the country and they'd still know each other from their fellows days. And I'm sure that it was instrumental in making the history of landscape architecture a true profession and in spreading it from east coast schools to universities all around the country. That kind of collegiality is another of the contributions of Dumbarton Oaks.
VKM: So, I have a list of the people who were on the Senior Fellows Committee. I don't know if you would have known any of them – but, Joseph Alsop, David Coffin, Howard Adams –
LF: Howard, I knew. Alsop, I knew to shake his hand. My husband knew him better because he was involved with the Portrait Gallery. Howard, Adams I knew. Howard was at that point at the National Gallery, I think. I think he was assistant director under Carter, but I – he may have just been heading the education department. I don't remember exactly. Howard Adams was an Adams of the Adams family. He was a descendant. I can't tell you exactly how, but his genealogy went way back in American history, and he was very proud of that. He was a really nice guy, and maybe he was the first director of the – no I can't think what it's called – Mr. Millon's program at the National Gallery that brings in fellows and professors, distinguished professors, and it's got an acronym –
LF: CASVA, CASVA. Howard may have been involved, if not as first director, in helping to set that up. But I'm not sure. But he would certainly have been – he was a good friend of Betty's. They were buddies. And I think he's still alive. You might talk to him about Betty.
VKM: He's still alive. That was the first interview I read.
LF: Oh, you did.
VKM: That's how I knew to get in touch with you.
LF: Oh, okay, yes. They were maybe college friends. They went back.
VKM: Did you –
LF: Who else was on the list?
VKM: Peter Hornbeck, Judith Colton, Allen Tate, Wilhelmina Jashemski.
LF: Allen Tate, I knew, but not from this connection. I sailed to Europe with Allen Tate on the Liberte. In 1961 my husband and I – and oh he was fun. He was fun when he was drunk. Don't – but that should not go in the record. But he loved his – was it a gin? – there was something. And his wife at that time was a niece of – I can't think of the name. She has a – her house is a gallery in Boston, beside the museum. It'll come to me in a minute.
VKM: The Gardner Museum?
LF: The Gardner Museum! Isabella Gardner. Thank you, thank you
VKM: It's a beautiful museum.
LF: And his wife was a niece of Isabella's.
VKM: Really?
LF: And it – oh they – wonderful stories to tell. But we – a seven day crossing, and we would sit around and drink on the crossing, and that – that was a joy. And he took us up to Forenza. He really knew Italy, and from Florence, he gave us a guided tour of Forenza, which was a day I'll never forget. And he loved gardens, so I can understand why he was on that committee. But as I say, I had nothing to do with him here at Dumbarton Oaks. It was just a lucky accident.
VKM: It's still nice to know.
LF: And, of course, I read his poetry. But, we all – in those days he was a really famous poet.
VKM: Did you ever get to meet Wilhelmina Jashemski? Because she –
LF: Yes, I mean I've heard –
VKM: – she died before we could – before the project started.
LF: She lived out in Silver Spring. And I was – when I was working on her essay, I had to go to the house once or twice to check things out with her. Very gracious lady! Lovely person. I know Betty was very fond of her. She, if I remember correctly – and now I'm trying to remember her paper, that was just about the time that the horticulturists were discovering that they could – as they were digging up seeds – that they could identify the seeds that were used in Roman gardens, and I think that appears in her paper.
VKM: She did, I think, the gardens of Pompeii.
LF: Yes, oh yes, of course. Those would have been very much buried, and she was able to, you know, tell us what was actually planted in those gardens. So, she had a certain scientific background as well. She was – she really – but, you know, I met her a few times. She was always lovely to me. I heard her deliver her paper. I'm glad you reminded me that that was in it. But, I can't tell you much about her otherwise.
VKM: Well, I think that's – do you have any memories of Dumbarton Oaks that are particularly prominent or that you think that we should know about?
LF: Two – well one being Betty – and I'll talk about her in a minute. The other being – as I mentioned, the garden library was in this west wing, and the research part of the library, as opposed to the rare books, was down in the basement, and there was no elevator. Prominent on the landscape architecture scene in Washington was a man named Charlie McLaughlin. His widow is still living in Chevy Chase. Both Charlie and his wife Ann had been victims of polio, I guess in their teens, and Charlie was paralyzed from, I guess, the hip down. He had no use of his legs at all. Charlie was a great expert on Fredrick Law Olmsted and his gardens. Indeed Charlie was one of the team that was editing the Olmsted papers, which of course are scattered all over the country. And they were editing and publishing the Olmsted papers, and they were based here in Washington, and Charlie's office was here in Washington, and from time to time he would come to use the library here at Dumbarton Oaks, which was down in the basement, and there was no elevator. And I would watch in horror as Charlie would get up and tighten the braces on his legs and then work himself backwards down the spiral staircase, hanging on to the armrest going arm by arm. It was like you'd go down a rope, if you were going down a fire escape. He would work his way down to the library, where Laura Byers by that time would have brought down his crutches and he could get around. So, that is one of my great visual recollections of Dumbarton Oaks. And the other of course is working with Betty, who was wonderful fun, and very learned, and always willing to share her knowledge, and a good-time-Charlie. She came from Texas. She was not an eastern socialite, although she had gone to Vassar, I think. I believe she's a Vassar graduate, and then I guess she did her – I think I remember that she did her graduate work at Harvard. But she was a good Texas – I don't know- she spoke her mind as you would in Texas. And then she was a lot of fun – she was good – lots of fun at parties. I always loved to – she came to dinner a lot. She had been coming to dinner before she hired me, and the Lowrys were good friends, and we used to have a good time together, and we visited her well after her retirement. Up in Vermont she had a country place. It was – we had a good time there. So, I have only fond recollections of Betty. She was a hard worker, and I think very highly respected in her profession. She must have been to get on all those UNESCO panels, and I think she did a lot of good things for Dumbarton Oaks, at least to my mind. She had one daughter down in Texas, and the daughter died before Betty did, which was rather sad. Betty had been divorced – never heard her speak about her husband. And she moved up to Cambridge, where she lived in the winter. She had an apartment. I don't think I ever saw her apartment there. I knew the building it was in. Bates pointed it out, and she and Bates Lowry were good friends too. I think she died before he did. I can't remember. That generation is pretty much gone. Not Betty Benson – she's still around. But there aren't a lot of people. I guess, if you had to come to me with my short years, there can't be a lot of people who remember.
VKM: Well, you've been really really informative, so –
LF: I hope so. Talking to people, I know, gives you a kind of view that you can't get from reading the record.
VKM: Yes.
LF: And if any other questions occur to you, feel free to call me.
VKM: Thank you so much!
LF: Are you going to transcribe this? Or does it –?
VKM: Yes.
LF: Well, if questions occur –
VKM: Okay. Thank you very much.]]>
Stephen Whiteman is the 2012–2014 A. W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. His current research explores the imagination and creation of cultural and political landscapes in the early Qing court, particularly through garden-building, image-making and textual inscription. A former junior fellow in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, he received his doctorate in Art History from Stanford University and has taught the history of East Asian art and architecture at Middlebury College and the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Click here to view the lecture flyer.]]>
Back row (left to right): Matthew Briel, Robert Kitchen, Krzysztof Domzalski, Wolfram Drews, Manuela Studer-Karlen
Front row (left to right): Patrick Andrist, Susannah Italiano (Program Assistant in Byzantine Studies), Heather Hunter Crawley, Margaret Mullett (Director of Byzantine Studies), Jeffrey Walker, Massimo Bernabo, Martin Wallraff
Back row: Terre Ryan
Front row: Katherine Rinne, Xiangpin Zhou, M. M.
Not pictured: Naama Meishar
Back row (left to right): Elisa Mandell, Erick Rochette, Bridget Gazzo (Librarian, Pre-Columbian Studies), Cynthia Kristan-Graham
Front row (left to right): Lori Diel, Mary Pye (Interim Director of Pre-Columbian Studies), Emily Gulick-Jacobs (Program Assistant in Pre-Columbian Studies)]]>
ML: That is correct, indeed.
VKM: So how did you first come to be involved with Dumbarton Oaks?
ML: Well, obviously I went through the usual course of applying for the fellowship, and how did I think of doing that? Well, I suppose that it was already well known in the U.K. that Dumbarton Oaks was unique, I think, in offering a residential Fellowship specifically in the area of what we called just Garden History back then. And so I took my chances, and I suppose the one thing that had made me more alert to the possibility was that I'd met with John Dixon Hunt back in about 1982 – I guess it was, when I was thinking about postgraduate study, and although I didn't end up doing a Ph.D. with him, I was in touch with him and had written for his Journal of Garden History. And it so happened that he had just taken up the new appointment of Director of Garden and Landscape Studies, and so that particular conjunction was fortunate, and I benefited greatly from it.
VKM: What were your initial impressions of Dumbarton Oaks?
ML: Well, you can imagine, coming from London in early September, just about as the autumn was beginning to be on the horizon, and arriving in Washington, D.C. and Georgetown and hearing the birds singing, I was overwhelmed by the sense of Southernness, of the opulence and graciousness of the institution and its gardens. And then, it was very, very impressive; probably less impressive was the apartment, which had been allocated to me and my prospective wife, because I was just about to get married. And although we had actually a very, very happy year there, and it became our little home, it was not exactly what I'd pictured, and there was something of a difference between the graciousness of the institution and the less than gracious nature of the apartment – as I say, we came to make it home and so on. By contrast, when we came back for the second Fellowship, La Quercia had just been purchased, it was the first year, and that was an absolutely lovely place to live and I think actually met the expectations that I would have had, so I have to congratulate Dumbarton Oaks on making that acquisition, which I think was a very good one.
VKM: I think they're remodeling it soon because now it is considered no longer sufficient to be acceptable –
ML: Well, with all these things, obviously, it's all relative, and there are updates and technological improvements and so on, and I guess that has been experienced at the institution over the years that I've known it, with obviously the library being one of the major changes to have occurred – to bring that to an appropriate level.
VKM: So, were there any particularly memorable projects that you worked on?
ML: Yes, certainly. I could actually just add one point on the impression of the institution, and that is that at that stage you still felt, I think, a connection to the Blisses and the way they had left this, it was not just an institution, but you felt the sense that this was their home, and in particular the Rare Books Library, where I spent a lot of my time that third fellowship, was very much as I imagine it had been left by Mrs. Bliss. So, it wasn't just a library of rare books, but it was a very gorgeous room with an exquisite collection of paintings, furnishings, and the desk where I sat alone was just a wonderful piece of furniture, and of course, as I said, things have to change, and it was appropriate that, first of all, the library system was improved, there was greater security brought in, which was certainly appropriate, but at that particular point it was still possible to feel the connection to the original place, of the home. And then you had asked me about projects. Probably the most notable was that John Dixon Hunt was organizing the symposium for the Spring of 1989 to be a survey of the state of Garden and Landscape Studies, and of course that was a very exciting moment – even had a sense of a potential as the discipline was changing from that which had been dominated under the tenureship of Betty MacDougall – been dominated more by art historical studies. And here we were having a gathering of people who were bringing archaeological methods, and who were bringing also methods derived from sociology and anthropology, Michel Conan amongst them. So that when I looked at the list of contributors – and I was lucky enough to be one – I see not merely a number of senior figures like Wilhelmina Jashemski or Bill Kelso, but also these rising stars who would have an enormous influence on the discipline. Tom Williamson is there, Therese O'Malley, Jim Wescoat, Stephen Daniels, Robin Osborne, and Geza Hajos – on a personal note – became a very close colleague of mine and I did much work for him in Vienna in subsequent years. So, that was probably the most significant of the projects I became involved in, but adjunct to that was getting to know Therese O'Malley at CASVA at the National Gallery, and she was beginning work on what would emerge as her major work, her magnum opus, as it were, which has only just been published this past year, and she invited me to be an adviser on that, and it was through her that I came to travel down to Charleston for a colloquium in March of 1989, and at the end of the interview I can tell you a story which comes of that – out of that, which is more on the personal side.
VKM: You mentioned Wilhelmina Jashemski was at this, I guess, working on this project, did you get to meet her?
ML: Well, yes in the sense that she was obviously one of the speakers, I couldn't say I got to know her personally very well, but I became aware of her work in a way that would not have been true prior to her symposium. And, indeed, I still use her significant work on Pompeii when I teach at Harvard. It was also, of course, during this year that one of the Fellows was Nicholas Purcell from St. John's College, Oxford, who had worked with Jashemski, and he's remained a lifelong friend and colleague. So I think on the personal level, Dumbarton Oaks is very, very significant in setting up for me various connections, networks. It wasn't just that it provided that wonderful space and environment to do my own work in.
VKM: At some points in the past, there's been tension between Harvard and Dumbarton Oaks over control of some issues, but very often financial ones. Did you ever get a sense of the prevailing feeling toward Harvard while you were there?
ML: I don't think so because, of course, I was a Fellow not an employee. And although it happened that subsequently I became a member of the faculty at Harvard at the Graduate School of Design – and I'm now aware of the relationship or not between the two institutions – at the time as a Fellow I don't think that impinged at all. It really was not something over which I had any awareness or felt any sense of tension or controversy. Of course, now that John Beardsley – who is my colleague from the Graduate School of Design – is Director of Garden and Landscape Studies the opportunity for a closer liaison between the two institutions is positive.
VKM: Do you think they're taking advantage of that?
ML: I think, indeed. I mean, I've taken upon some of it in the role of a Senior Fellow where, through Jan and through John, it's been possible, for instance, to invite one of the Fellows of a given year to come up and speak to my students. My colleague Gary Hilderbrand was running a studio which was about the Mall landscape proposals and that was a project organized in conjunction with the University of Virginia Landscape and Architecture, and John was able to have them for a very interesting workshop, so I think those opportunities are there and it's the first step towards a closer relationship, which seems to me quite proper.
VKM: You mentioned that you got to know a lot of people and did some networking while you were at Dumbarton Oaks. Do you think that that was intentionally encouraged by the institution or just something that happened, you had all those scholars here –?
ML: Well, obviously, some of it was adventitious, it depended who was there and whom you happened to run across. What was true was that when you sat down to lunch in the Fellows Building at the time you mixed amongst other scholars from the other disciplines, and so whether it was just a level of private socialization, you got to know the people who were working in Byzantine Studies and Pre-Columbian Studies. And from that first fellowship we still have a very close friend, Smiljka Gabelic, who was a Fellow in Byzantine Studies, so that was extremely enriching and it was encouraged by the institution and by the Director through the fact that you attended all the presentations by all the Fellows, so you got to know their work and you got to know them individually.
VKM: You think that while you were there that was a successful attempt? We'd had, you know, varying reports on the interaction between departments at different points in time.
ML: Well, yes, I think it does depend on the moment because certainly John Beardsley last year was very successful in bringing the three disciplines together through the artistic installation that you organized which required the cooperation of the Byzantine Studies and Pre-Columbian Studies. Certainly at the institutional level that must have helped promote better mixing, better harmony. Whether that worked amongst the level of the Fellows, that I couldn't comment on, but on both occasions, I would say we got to know informally if not formally the other Fellows in the other disciplines, and the fact that we were living in the same building, whether it was Sherry Hall up Wisconsin the first time, or at La Quercia the second time, that obviously encouraged getting together. And then, for instance, in the case of the second time, there was the birth of a child.
VKM: Her mother is living at the Guest House with me, actually.
ML: Is that right?
VKM: Yeah, yeah.
ML: Well, yeah, that's right – so that, obviously – those things – that the Fellows brought family members with them, whether it was a spouse or children, all of those, I think, encouraged a sense that you were not just at an institution but that this had a sort of a familial aspect which was a continuation of the original nature of Dumbarton Oaks as a family home, and I would encourage further efforts to perpetuate that.
VKM: While you were here, did you ever attend the concerts by the Friends of Music Program?
ML: Yes, I think we went to every single one, and again that was something that made life feel very good, and it made it feel very intimate, and it made it very hard leaving Dumbarton Oaks. In fact, when we were down this past May for the symposium and we met with some of the Fellows of this past year, we could feel from them a certain pain on leaving the place after a year and so all those things, I think, encouraged a sense of a certain intimacy. But what I can say is that I didn't attend, on either occasion, the symposia organized by Byzantine Studies or Pre-Columbian Studies, but I made completely an exception to the rule.
VKM: While you were here, you said you were using the Rare Book Room a lot. I just don't know, was that the same as the Garden Library at the time or –?
ML: Well, the Rare Book Room – I don't know, back in, I guess, only eighteen months ago it still is the same room as it was where Linda sits. I assume she still has a desk in there. That was where I spent probably ninety percent of the first Fellowship. The second time round, because I was not using those resources so much and I was actually working on finishing the manuscript of my book, I was more confined to my office – in fact was more like a hermit who rarely came out. Whereas on the first occasion I can recall, for instance, sitting in the Garden Library. And it I think Christopher Hogwood from Britain – the conductor of the early music ensemble – he was there researching a manuscript. And the sense of it as an extraordinary place with extraordinary collections was that much more evident. I would imagine now that the library has moved to a separate building, a new building, that feeling of being closely tied to the original collections of the Blisses that probably something has got lost there.
VKM: Were there any resources that you remember being useful or –?
ML: Well, resources within D.O. or outside?
VKM: Well, either, I guess, but mainly within D.O., the other collections or the, I don't know what they have in the way of Garden Museum, but –
ML: Well, the garden itself offers a resource, which is, at a subliminal level as well as a place to consider the discipline. Obviously having lived through a full season from the fall through to the summer the first time, using the swimming pool amongst other things, and so on, it was an extraordinarily invigorating environment in which to work. That you could spend four hours in the library then you would go out and you would visit with the birds, particularly during the second Fellowship, there were several feral cats that were living in the gardens that Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn eventually adopted and took with him back to his home in Hanover, but there are all kinds of little interactions there at the biological level that for me were extremely enriching. But in terms of other resources, I would say those were really outside Dumbarton Oaks and notable would be of course CASVA and the opportunity to use their library and have discussions with Therese O'Malley and her colleagues or go to presentations there.
VKM: Have you been back to use the new library since they built it?
ML: I haven't actually used it in the sense of study there. On my appointment as Senior Fellow, I was given a very, very thorough tour of it and I was extremely impressed by the modernity, by the technological sophistication of it. It seems terrific, and I think in the circumstances, given that it required a very considerable intervention you know to a site, which has a heritage status, the eventual outcome was really quite brilliantly done. The building fits very well in its landscape and I know from my colleagues that they look out into the woods and hear the birds, so that sort of connection to the landscape outside your window is still maintained, but I haven't had the benefit of being able to use it as a study place.
VKM: While you've been at Dumbarton Oaks there have been several different Directors of Studies in Garden and Landscape, John Dixon Hunt, Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, and John Beardsley. Have you have the chance to have much interaction with any of them?
ML: Well obviously with – if I start back to front – John Beardsley, of course, I know very well because he is my colleague at the Graduate School of Design. And I was very honored to be invited to be a Senior Fellow during the first year that he was in tenure. So, I am very much aware of the innovative way that he is steering Garden and Landscape Studies. I think he and Jan have brought a very good atmosphere to the institution. Beyond that obviously, I don't know it in the same way being a Fellow. The first time round – John Dixon Hunt – I've already conveyed something of the excitement of what he was bringing which was paralleled by Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, who was bringing a new approach through his studies in ideology and with a sociological political method. The volumes that have come out of his time, Nature and Ideology in particular, have stood the test of time, and I use it repeatedly, and both of them have become very close colleagues. John Dixon Hunt ended up publishing my book when I finally got it out after the second fellowship. And Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn – I've recently been working with him on a new publication due out this year. In between whiles, of course I kept contact through Michel Conan, particularly in two respects. One was that he invited me to give a lecture after my book The Flowering of the Landscape Garden came out – so this would be about 2000–2001 – and as a result of that I was able to incorporate that lecture material into the volume that he published on Bourgeois and Aristocratic Cultural Encounters. Second he invited me to review the volume on horticulture and botany which I think is a really splendid volume, so each in turn I has brought a very, very distinctive approach to the discipline, extending the scope of it, not merely bringing in allied disciplines, but also expanding the range of studies across the globe so that the applications now for the coming year for example have transformed what would have been the more limited range applications back in 1988–89.
VKM: Both 1988 and 2008 were transition years between Directors of Study. At the time was that changeover prominent, or did they just go smoothly one to the other?
ML: Well, obviously it's hard to comment because although I had known the work of Betty MacDougall and so on, and as I said, I knew the work that Michel Conan was doing – my knowledge of the institution was very much the imprint that both Hunt and John Beardsley have put on their tenure, so I couldn't really talk about transitions. I don't think I have enough knowledge of that piece to have a relevant comment.
VKM: So, you have been a member of the Board of Senior Fellows in Garden and Landscape Studies for two years now – what do you consider to be the major responsibilities of the board?
ML: Well, obviously, literally there are certain responsibilities to help in the selection of the applicants for fellowships each year, providing support to the Director on the question of the topics of the symposium, and I would say at a broader level there is a responsibility which I feel very personally, which is to ensure the sort of collective memory of the institution the way it was run, the way it has changed. Having had the experience of being a Fellow twice over and having maintained very close contacts through the Conan years, there's much that I feel that I can contribute at the level of knowing the nature of the transformations of the discipline, much about the personnel at Dumbarton Oaks, the gardens themselves, and many of the experts. There are things that could be forgotten – little aspects which are in fact of great significance.
VKM: Do they make an effort to have people who have been Fellows before on the board of Senior Fellows, do you know?
ML: Well, in fact, that inevitably happens, and I would encourage it because I think it's precisely that sense of continuity and collective memory that is important amongst the current Senior Fellows in Garden and Landscape Studies. I may be the only one who certainly was a Fellow twice, and possibly I may be the only one who has been a Fellow, so that appears as rather important.
VKM: Have you had any involvement in the Contemporary Landscape Design Collection?
ML: No, I can answer that quite simply.
VKM: Do you know if it's still going on, because the references to it sort of went away after a while in the files?
ML: I don't know about that. One has to assume that John would have enormous interest in it because of the particular interests of his own, but it's not something I can comment on.
VKM: What was your reaction to the reinstatement of the Summer Garden Internships?
ML: Well, I didn't know. One aspect – when we're talking about stuff like collective memory – one aspect I didn't know a lot about – I think I was speaking to my colleague at the Graduate School of Design, Michael Van Valkenburgh, who possibly was one of the last of the old interns – and all I can say is that it seems to me a very good initiative. It certainly is providing an opportunity for research on the gardens as well as an opportunity for eight young students, eight young about-to-be-practitioners to gain a sense of history and of methodology. So, that seems to me actually entirely in keeping with what I would understand to be the legacy of Mrs. Bliss, that she left the gardens, the collections, and a sense of an emerging field, those things need to be held together, I think, effectively. And there could be a danger that without the internships of having the garden really as a separate entity. I personally have had good contact with Gail over the two seasons that I've been a Senior Fellow, and I think she's also demonstrating a great interest in the research aspect of the garden because it seems to me it parallels the collections in Byzantine and Pre-Columbian disciplines. The gardens should not be forgotten as a collection in its own way.
VKM: When the board was discussing bringing it back, did they mention why the program had been allowed to lapse in the first place?
ML: Nope, I don't recall hearing – as I say, that's one aspect of this history I am not particularly versed in, but it struck me as a very positive initiative and so I guess I didn't probe further.
VKM: I guess continuing on that theme a little bit. In some of the other interviews, people have discussed the division in Garden and Landscape Studies between academics and practitioners as a problem in the field in general and at Dumbarton Oaks in particular. What are you thoughts on how Dumbarton Oaks has addressed that divide?
ML: Well, I can answer that at a personal level, which is that because I'm both a practitioner and an academic I don't see a problem of a divide there. It would actually seem to me wise to ensure that amongst the Senior Fellows and indeed amongst the Fellows that an effort is made to ensure the representation of those who are both academics and professionals or practitioners is sustained because I believe that goes back to the original vision of Mrs. Bliss, who saw it as both a study center and as a place which is emblematic of the best of design, of practice, of horticulture. And because of the particular interests I have in horticultural history alongside Garden and Landscape Studies, I'm always keen when I see an application come in from somebody who is not merely a practitioner but somebody who understands processes of landscape from a horticultural or an organic point of view – that sort of point of view – that application is given careful consideration for those reasons.
VKM: Are there any other systemic issues in this field that you would consider significant?
ML: I think that's probably too broad a question to be able to answer, when one's looking at the makeup of Senior Fellows, and I have to say that the present makeup of our group seems to me very extremely well considered. It is important that practitioners are represented, also that the different traditions across the world are represented, that we have somebody representing Asia, broadly – that's been a tradition – that those aspects are kept in balance.
VKM: What do you think have been some of the major changes in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks since you first came here?
ML: Well, I guess it would build on that point which has to do with geographical spread, at the time that I applied for the first Fellowship, my guess would be that the applications were coming mainly from Europe and from North America and the tradition of, for instance, looking at Renaissance studies and ancient Rome, antiquity, were very much grounded in the European world. Whereas now the applications are coming in from China, from Japan, from Australia, from India, Pakistan, the Middle East, Turkey, and it's made the applications that much more competitive to the point where it is often a source of great regret that we are not able to offer more fellowships because the caliber of the applicants is really quite superb. Of course, beyond that, it's the expansion of the discipline, so that the influences of sociology and anthropology, in particular through Michel Conan, have dramatically changed the direction and complexion of Landscape Studies.
VKM: During your time at Dumbarton Oaks, have there been any important collaborations that you're aware of with other institutions in Garden and Landscape Studies?
ML: That's hard to answer. Obviously, I personally have had collaborations, which have come about through Dumbarton Oaks. I'd already mentioned Therese O'Malley of CASVA and her keywords project, but I could equally mention Amy Meyers who was a Fellow just a couple of years before me, whom I got to know through Dumbarton Oaks, and the collaborations I have done with her – first of all at the Huntington and now at Yale at the British Art Center, most recently on an exhibition there about Mrs. Delany – these are some of the personal collaborations that have come out of that network.
VKM: Does the program itself seek out collaborative projects with – I don't know – with CASVA or with –?
ML: Well, I think Michel Conan, I think, was incredibly resourceful in terms of working with the Smithsonian, with working with institutions in Europe. I think one of them was done with the Huntington. Some of that was probably rising out of the imperative of the redesign of the library and so on, and the difficulty of holding a colloquium at Dumbarton Oaks. But I think that's very important, to be looking for those opportunities because in this sense Dumbarton Oaks still holds a unique position world-wide in terms of a center of excellence in Garden and Landscape Studies – there's really nowhere to compare with it, but there are many other great institutions that offer the opportunity for collaboration, including obviously those at Harvard. So that when I think about if the place as an institution within the discipline, I think of the fact that in the U.K. the efforts to get garden and landscape studies set up for research – and whether it was at the University of York or the Architectural Association – those efforts led to very, very good training programs while they lasted. They no longer exist, but they never became centers for studies, offering fellowships – so then that's why Dumbarton Oaks continues to get applications from high caliber people from around the world.
VKM: Do you have any memories about Dumbarton Oaks that you'd like to share?
ML: Well, I mean, obviously, for me and my wife at a personal level, it's the first place that we lived at as a newly married couple, so it was a honeymoon here and it means that we come back to it with particular resonance for us. But I could tell you the story, which came out of the connection through Therese O'Malley and the conference that was organized at Charleston, South Carolina in March of 1989. She invited me to attend that and indeed to be the keynote speaker, and as a result of that we thought, well, here's an opportunity to explore the South and to go as far as Savannah, Georgia. And when we realized we would be there for a couple of days, I contacted a friend of mine who had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford when I was an undergraduate, Matt Schaffer, and I said, "Matt, can you put us in touch with someone who knows about the gardens of Savannah?" And he said, "Well, our realtor would be the person to start with." And through the realtor we got an invitation to visit a woman, Louisa Farrand Wood, who turned out to be the niece of Beatrix Farrand, and when we arrived at her house, on the wall right opposite the door was a portrait of Beatrix Farrand. And I said to her, Louisa Farrand Wood, who by then was just over eighty, I said, "Well, that's extraordinary, I've never seen this before." And she said, "Well I'm just trying to decide what to do about it." And she said, "Well I could either give it to those people out in California who have the Farrand Papers, or I was thinking about Dumbarton Oaks." And so inevitably when I came back to Dumbarton Oaks I spoke to John Dixon Hunt, and I said, "Well it might not be a bad idea to invite Louisa Farrand Wood up to Dumbarton Oaks." And as result of that, the portrait, which is in a beautiful oval frame, came to Dumbarton Oaks, and in fact, I was asking Gail about it, because I'd not see it hanging where it used to hang in the Garden Library entrance hall. So that was one thing, but there was a second thing that came from that particular visit southward. Louisa gave us a copy of her book and also a cutting of a honeysuckle, which is the yellow form of the American honeysuckle, Lonicera sempervirens. And I brought it back to Don Smith, the gardener, and at first he said, "Well, we don't need another honeysuckle," but when I explained the connection he said, "Yeah, we'll find a place." And that and its sister plants still are in the garden, they're in the terrace below the rose garden, I always forget what it's called, the Fountain Terrace just on the way through to the Arbor Terrace, either side of the gate there. And so that and the interview which I did for Don, with Don Smith, commissioned by John Dixon Hunt, are actually quite important elements in the history of the garden and the connection to Mrs. Bliss, Beatrix Farrand, the making of the garden, and so on. That tape of the interview which I conducted with Don Smith, I understand with Gail is from her, and that probably promptly should go into the Archives.
VKM: Yeah, definitely, I will tell James to ask her about that.
ML: Yeah, and you can ask also about the painting, because, as I say, when I was last there I didn't see it anywhere.
VKM: I will. Actually, can I ask about the story about Joachim and the cats? He brought them back to Germany with them?
ML: Yes, that's right. One is still alive, the other no longer, unfortunately. And when we saw him this past May he had some very nice photographs of the one that's surviving, I forgot the name. I have it all in my computer somewhere. But we had a great interest in feral cats, which was actually reinforced when we returned to Toronto after the second fellowship. We came back to find that the woman who had been living in our apartment in Toronto had been feeding cats on the street, and that we suddenly had outside our house the responsibility to look after these semi-wild cats. We've been feeding them ever since, so you could say that comes out of the Dumbarton Oaks story.
VKM: Is there anything else that I've left out that you would like to add?
ML: I don't think so, and obviously as far as that story goes, you could ask both – Linda knows a lot about the story of the feral cats, and the man himself could obviously fill you in.
VKM: All right, thank you very much.
ML: You're very welcome, and I will send two copies of the signed form to James by tomorrow.
VKM: Okay, thanks I will tell him to look out for that.]]>
PJ: That is correct.
VKM: All right. Thank you for agreeing to speak with me. According to our records, you joined the board of Senior Fellows in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in 1999, is that correct?
PJ: No. 1998 to 2004.
VKM: All right.
PJ: And I received a letter from Harvard University to that effect on July 14, 1998.
VKM: Okay. So how did you first come to be involved with Dumbarton Oaks? Just, they sent you a letter?
PJ: The network of people involved with Landscape and Garden Studies is not extensive; most of us know each other. I happened to be good friends with John Dixon Hunt and subsequently with Michel Conan, mostly from my academic and professional environment. They of course were both Directors at one point or another in Landscape and Garden Studies and it was through that connection, I believe, that I was invited to become a Senior Fellow. Previously, I have both a Masters in Architecture and a Masters in Landscape Architecture from Harvard University, and subsequently taught there on two or three occasions. So I have a nice link, if you will, between the Graduate School of Design, Dumbarton Oaks, and the field of Landscape and Garden Studies.
VKM: OK. When you first came to Dumbarton Oaks, what were your initial impressions?
PJ: My initial impressions of Dumbarton Oaks actually preceded my being a member of the Senior Fellows. On a number of occasions, both as a graduate student and then as a professor in the School of Landscape Architecture at Harvard, I had traveled to Washington on various missions and had made it a point to drop into Dumbarton Oaks on a number of occasions to visit the library that they had at that point on landscape and garden history. I was well received although then, as now, there's a certain kind of hierarchical atmosphere that pervades Dumbarton Oaks. And as a student I was perhaps less warmly welcomed than as a professor, and I must say that the only thing that's changed, let's say from the '70s to the current situation, is that security has become an overwhelming issue at Dumbarton Oaks. I felt much freer when I was there initially than as time progressed. That's something that of course is an administrative nightmare, I'm sure, but as a user and as a member of the community of Fellows, I found that the security issues interrupted a fair amount of the normal comings and goings and interactions amongst people at Dumbarton Oaks. But that's perhaps more extensive a comment than you wanted at this point.
VKM: Not at all. Can I ask, we have some records about your serving as a Fellow in spring of 2008, but not a lot.
PJ: OK. After I left as a Senior Fellow – I left in 2004 – I subsequently was invited to participate in the Symposium on Contemporary Landscape Design in 2005, and thereafter I kept in contact with Michel Conan. And he, I believe, talked to Ned Keenan about appointing me as the first Beatrix Farrand Distinguished Senior Fellow. There aren't too many records on that particular era – I'm not quite sure why – but the essential research that I was involved with at that time was on the transformative impacts of large-scale development infrastructure on the landscape. Examples that you would be familiar with in the States would be the TVA project in Tennessee, across the border the Saint Lawrence Seaway Project, and further north in Canada the James Bay Hydroelectric Project, all of which transformed the landscapes in which they were introduced, and I was doing research on those impacts. I only spent about four or five months as Distinguished Fellow in the winter and spring of 2008.
VKM: OK. And you were living at Dumbarton Oaks while you were doing that?
PJ: My wife and I – who I've been married to for 43 years – lived in one room upstairs in the old Fellows Building, and it was sort of like being in camp all over again. We have a very nice home in Montreal with a big backyard. We garden and do all sorts of things. And I must say living in one room upstairs was quite a challenge, and the fact that we're still married indicates that we might still get along fairly well!
VKM: Sounds like college all over again
PJ: You got it. Your college roommate however is not necessarily your wife! That's how we spent that particular period of our stay at Dumbarton Oaks. My wife, as well, was on sabbatical leave – she's also a professor – so we managed to actually enjoy ourselves very much in Washington.
VKM: I'm glad to hear it! Throughout your tenure at Dumbarton Oaks, were there any particularly memorable projects that you worked on?
PJ: Well, there were quite a number of activities that were happening during the time I was there. Certainly the beginning of the contemporary landscape focus was something that I personally was very much involved with and very supportive of, the preposition– proposition; a preposition is not the kind of thing you want to end a sentence with. But I was nonetheless very supportive of that initiative and got involved with the symposium and published a paper on Fernando Chacel's work in Brazil. I really believe that Dumbarton Oaks needs to expand its fairly substantial reputation as a center of history of landscape architecture to include contemporary work as well, and certainly Michel Conan, who was Director at the time, devoted a great deal of energy to that. I think we initiated something, which may or may not continue with the current Director of Studies. I'm not sure whether John Beardsley is that keen on continuing that initiative, but that certainly was one of the more interesting ones. I also was involved, not anywhere near as directly, with the initiative on garden archaeology, and one of the activities I was involved with was a symposium on Bernard Lassus's landscape approach, which I thought was particularly interesting; a book's been published on that work. What else – I was also involved in giving a Dumbarton Oaks public lecture on an aspect of landscape that I think is particularly interesting, and that's linking folklore and, let's say, the other side of a scientific approach to landscape conservation. The other side being more that of the artistic and folklore-type of background to why people relate to the landscape the way they do. I gave a public lecture on that, and it was actually quite well received. I was quite pleased with its reception. So I would say basically the workshops, the symposia, and the seminars that we were involved with for well over six years, and then that very nice four or five-month stint as a Distinguished Senior Fellow was really a highlight of my activities with Dumbarton Oaks.
VKM: At some points in the past, there has been tension between Harvard and Dumbarton Oaks over a lot of issues, but often financial. Did you ever get a sense of the prevailing feeling towards Harvard at Dumbarton Oaks while you were there?
PJ: Well, of course I'm one of the few people that may have some insight not only on the feeling of Dumbarton Oaks towards Harvard but let's say, Harvard towards Dumbarton Oaks, but it would be limited to the Landscape and Garden Studies domain. The Graduate School of Design – where I mentioned I graduated from it and taught there – never related to Dumbarton Oaks in any viable fashion. I believe the split between the profession and the professional education somehow or other never really linked clearly with Dumbarton Oaks, which was a center of historical research at that time. And somehow or other Harvard didn't really have much to do with Dumbarton Oaks, and Dumbarton Oaks frankly didn't have that much to do with Harvard in the Graduate School of Design. The metaphor that I use was it was like very young children engaged in parallel play in the same sandbox. They were doing their thing side by side but not really communicating in any way whatsoever. The issue of money, frankly I think that was much more a relationship of Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard as an institution more than the Graduate School of Design because I don't believe there was very much competition between the Graduate School of Design for funds from Harvard and Dumbarton Oaks for funds from Harvard. But there is little question in my mind that of the three centers of studies, Landscape and Garden Studies is – to be generous – the younger of the three children, and certainly the less well supported. That's a whole other issue. I think both Ned Keenan and Jan have been quite supportive of the Landscape and Garden Studies, but when it comes down the nitty-gritty of how many Fellows there are, how many Junior Fellows, how much money is available to each one of the sectors, etc, historically much more energy has been devoted to Pre-Columbian Studies and the Byzantine world than Landscape and Garden Studies. I think some of it is our fault, "our" being the collective group of people involved in Landscape and Garden Studies. We haven't managed to link the profession and the researchers together in any coherent way. Certainly the initiatives that John Dixon Hunt and Michel Conan attempted were an attempt to pique the interest of the academic professional community, and the Contemporary Design Collection was both Michel's and my idea of a way of linking that community into Dumbarton Oaks in a more substantial manner. I still think it's the way to go. I have no idea whether or not that will be the way it goes, but until the Landscape and Garden Studies can link and attract a larger community of professionals and academics that are interested in the work that was being and is being generated at Dumbarton Oaks, I'm afraid it will always be the third wheel on the tricycle.
VKM: That's very interesting, actually. I'm going to move on a little bit to the social side of Dumbarton Oaks. Was there any attempt to encourage socialization among the scholars? I mean both the junior scholars and the senior scholars.
PJ: Well, again, as a Senior Fellow, we visited Dumbarton Oaks two or three times a year. We listened to the presentations of the Junior Fellows and the Fellows I think once a year to give them a reality check, if you will, or to encourage them with respect to the work they were doing. But as a Senior Fellow we weren't around that much to have a sense of the socialization process. What I can say, however, is this, that the idea that everybody had lunch together I think created a good atmosphere amongst the Fellows of the particular study groups. The landscape people would eat with the landscape people, and the Byzantines would eat with their group, and the pre-Columbians with theirs, and I suspect that certainly did contribute to a sense of community. When I was there as the Distinguished Senior Fellow, I was living there, and I was amazed at the lack of flow amongst the three groups. Certainly there are commonalities amongst the Landscape and Pre-Columbian Studies; there's no question about it. I guess I spent a fair amount of time trying to encourage that cross-fertilization when I was living there. And to some extent I think I was successful, but it takes a lot of animation because people are more inclined to focus on their own particular research and to work in silos, as the universities are now structured. They're basically trained to deal with the people that are dealing with the subjects that they're interested in. So the cross-fertilization I don't think is high. It does require nurturing and animation and I would say that it's a goal that Dumbarton Oaks should consider a little more carefully. But in the long run I must say that the scholars that are selected are generally selected because of their project proposals and are primarily focused on those project proposals, so it's understandable that taking a risk in trying to see what links between Pre-Columbian and Landscape and Garden Studies might exist requires a fair amount of energy and a fair amount of self-confidence on the part of the people involved to say, "hey, I'll take a look at this and maybe it'll produce something." It's not an easy situation for a young scholar to have to be confronted with, if you will. On the more senior level, I think that there was a great deal of interest in interacting, and that would be amongst the scholars and the directors of studies, incidentally, who really did spend a fair amount of time talking to each other. It may just be an age-related thing or where you happen to be in your career path that would define perhaps the willingness or lack thereof to interact with other fields. Sorry; that was a fairly long and a convoluted explanation, but it's a complicated issue.
VKM: Yeah. Do you think the garden archaeology initiative is related to that desire in the Senior Fellows to have more interaction between the departments?
PJ: I think that it's a kind of an activity, which was generated largely by Michel Conan. But Michel had a former student, Aicha Malek, who worked with Wilhelmina Jashemski, and it was a very powerful sort of two people. Aicha was just really, really very bright, and Wilhelmina recognized it and had not only no problem with it, but was very supportive. Michel basically added a lot of the administrative and intellectual push behind that, and I think it was an attempt to reach beyond the common borders that usually define what Landscape and Garden Studies are, but he did that in a number of other areas as well. There was a gentleman named James Dickie, who was an interesting researcher – I believe he was British by birth – who had spent a great deal of time in and around the Alhambra, understood and read and wrote Arabic beautifully, and was one of the first to be encouraged to start looking at the linguistic properties of the decorations of the Alhambra, and to try and relate the landscape structure with the semiotic, if you will, messages that occur throughout the Alhambra. And that was the first time, I believe, that that initiative was taken. So there are quite a number of interesting intellectual stories that have occurred, generated primarily by the Director of Studies, not exclusively but primarily, and in the time that I was there certainly strongly supported and improved, if that's the right word but elaborated perhaps is a better word, by the Senior Fellows.
VKM: Did you ever attend the symposia and talks for Byzantine and Pre-Columbian Studies, or the concerts by the Friends of Music program?
PJ: Well, when Ellen and I were living there, we attended the concerts with enormous pleasure. It's an unbelievable privilege to be seated in what's called the Music Room, let's say about 30 feet away from some of the best musicians in the world. You sort of feel like they have been invited into your living room. It was a marvelous experience. In terms of the symposia, as a Fellow I went to all of the symposia that were given by Landscape, Byzantine and Pre-Columbian Fellows or Junior Fellows. I'm not quite sure which was which, when I was there, and actually believe that I contributed a fair amount of comments from my perspective, particularly in the Pre-Columbian context because much of what they were doing was situated in landscape settings that I suggested had an impact on why they were where they were, why they were oriented the way they were oriented, etc., etc. And I really enjoyed very, very much listening to the presentations of the Fellows in fields that weren't my own. So yes, I was very much involved in all three.
VKM: You were also at Dumbarton Oaks during the construction of the new library, right?
PJ: Yeah
VKM: Can you give me a sense of your reaction to that project, and that of your colleagues?
PJ: Well, I was involved with Ned Keenan at the very, very beginning, when the first proposal was made, which created an enormous storm of protest. The initial proposal was to put the library underneath the grass lawn in front of the main building, extending towards the ravine. And it was to be an underground library, no visibility, etc., etc., and all sorts of people had all sorts of problems with that particular proposal – myself included, incidentally. And then, because of my background, I guess, I was asked and offered some advice with respect to what alternatives might be available, and whether or not it was or wasn't viable to proceed with the first proposal. The second proposal, which is the one that was generated towards the end of my tenure as chair of the Senior Fellows, seemed to be more consistent with a campus type of approach to developing the property, and when I came back and used the library and lived in the Fellows Building, I must say that it was, I think, very successful as a way of developing the property without having any really significant visual impact at all. So I think that was quite successful. I think the way the buildings function is a little bit less successful, but that's a whole other issue.
VKM: Did you use the library collection much, either before or during or after the construction?
PJ: I used it very much after the construction, and again while I was resident. I believe that the library has a really amazing collection of books. Once again the books are segregated by the study centers, and because I had the time, I found that there were quite a number of books upstairs in the Pre-Columbian area that I found most interesting. I must say that the librarians, plural, were very, very helpful and supportive in terms of saying, "OK, why don't you go to the Library of Congress, why don't you go here, why don't you go there," for particular things that I was looking for that were not available in the Dumbarton Oaks Collection. But by and large I think the library is really an amazing resource. I have really, really serious issues with respect to security and how it operates, and how it relates to people as people. I think it is in desperate need of some more humanizing aspects. I'm not an expert in security; I have absolutely no problem with making certain that things are not stolen, etc., etc., but I think the approach towards the individuals that use the environment is frankly off-putting.
VKM: Yeah, it is a bit.
PJ: I'm being extraordinarily gentle. When I was there, a young lady who I assume is approximately your age – we've never met so I'm guessing, but she was not an elderly lady – forgot her card with the color-coded thing, and they wouldn't let her in. They knew exactly who she was, etc., etc., and she said, "Look, I just have to go to my desk and get my book and come back," whatever the story was, and they just wouldn't. And she just broke down and almost had a nervous breakdown, because the whole approach was, "you're guilty, now prove you're innocent." It's not very scholarly, let's put it that way.
VKM: Is it all right for me to move on to talking about the Board of Senior Fellows now? You were a member of the Board of Senior Fellows in Garden and Landscape Studies for six years. What would you consider to be the major responsibilities of the Board while you were there?
PJ: I would say the formal major responsibility is to choose the Fellows for each new year, the Fellows and the Junior Fellows, to help shape the annual symposia, to chair sessions at the annual symposia, to suggest and support new initiatives for the Landscape Garden Studies component of Dumbarton Oaks, but the informal and probably most important activity of the Senior Fellows is to support and be critical of the Director of Studies, and to support the Director of Studies and the Landscape and Garden Studies component itself vis-à-vis the Director of Dumbarton Oaks. Basically to make the case for the new initiative and for the need for more support if such is necessary. And I would say that there's an awful lot that is critical in terms of the interpersonal relationships between the Senior Fellows, the Director of Studies and the Director of Dumbarton Oaks, which is virtually impossible to put down on paper in any formal way.
VKM: You were also chairman of the Board. Did that have any special responsibilities attached to it?
PJ: Well, I have a very good relationship both with Michel Conan, who's the Director of Studies, and with Ned Keenan, whom I liked a lot and I know he liked me a lot so it wasn't difficult for me to bring up issues with him. I was asked to help with my advice on the building project, which really almost more than anything else characterized the time that he was there. I know professionally that the number of meetings that Ned Keenan must have had with the myriad groups, both public and citizen groups, that were concerned with the development of Dumbarton Oaks – he must have had a thousand meetings over a three or four year period. And I was happy to help him with whatever advice I could give on that particular issue, and generally to make his life as pleasant as possible for the modest amount of time that I spent there as a Senior Fellow.
VKM: All right. Did you work closely with any of the other members of the Board?
PJ: Well, again, the Senior Fellows meet twice a year – sometimes three times, but usually twice a year – so it is much more a network of people than it is a working colleague relationship. I certainly did review a number of papers that were written by members of the Senior Fellows, supported a book proposal by one of them. You know, you do that kind of thing, but it's not usually the kind of thing where you develop a working colleague relationship and you're working on the same project together. The Senior Fellows basically come from all over North America and Europe, and in my case, there was even a Senior Fellow from Latin America, South America in fact. So no, you keep in touch through emails and through short notes and things of that nature, but I would say that it's more a networking procedure than it is a working relationship.
VKM: You said that mostly you just heard the presentations from the Junior Fellows and that was it. Were there any that you did work with?
PJ: Well, certainly not as a Senior Fellow, because as I said, our time is three days twice a year, so you can't really develop a working relationship with a Junior Fellow, other than if you might have known them before, and in one or two cases the Junior Fellows may have been students of Senior Fellows. I can't think of any specific examples, but that wouldn't surprise me. I know John Dixon Hunt sent a number of people from the University of Pennsylvania to Dumbarton Oaks, but I don't think he was Director of Studies at that point. So, we would know who they were, we'd be supportive of them, but we didn't really have a working relationship.
VKM: OK. One thing that I noticed when I was reading over the minutes of the Senior Fellows Board meetings was that you were often pushing to make things available online.
PJ: Yes.
VKM: How do you think Dumbarton Oaks handled the expanding importance of the Internet and Internet technology?
PJ: Boy, well, I will be frank. They handled it in the typical Dumbarton Oaks manner, which is, I would say, to look at the whole issue very thoroughly. I would say it was more a dramatic opera approach than, let's say, like jazz. They tend to crush problems to death, and in the development of a website, I would say that they've come a long way. I think they could be a lot further along, and I think it's a question once again of thinking a little bit further outside the box than they have a tendency to do. Now, having said that, I'm not really super aware of all the constraints that they're operating under. I know they have serious questions of protecting copyrights on materials that they have, etc., etc., so I guess my sense of getting involved with the Internet and everything that it represents – I would have hoped that it would have evolved a little bit more than it has, but I am sympathetic to the fact that there may be some serious constraints of which I am not that aware.
VKM: I listened to an interview, I think with John Duffy, where he said that Ned Keenan was someone who was also really pushing to have Dumbarton Oaks adopt new technology faster. Do you think that's also true?
PJ: Absolutely. I think Ned Keenan was, if I'm not mistaken, and I don't think I am, I think he was a consultant to the Library of Congress because of his expertise with respect to digital and digitalizing, if you will, materials. And there are a lot of problems associated with such a procedure. But he was definitely literate, if not extremely literate, with respect to electronic media and with respect to the whole electronic world. I think he was frustrated by the processes that he had to deal with at Dumbarton Oaks, and Lord knows that if he had trouble with it then there must have been some really serious constraints, because he was the boss!
VKM: This is a really general question, but what you would consider the greatest accomplishments of the Board while you were a member?
PJ: I would say there were three things. The support that was given by the Board for a contemporary landscape initiative, I think that was extremely important. It was well supported and, as I said, I'm not aware of how far down the line it's gone. That was certainly, I think, one of the more important things. I think the other thing was the support we gave the Director of Studies, Michel Conan, with respect to thinking outside the box, garden ecology being one issue, but there were others. I think that was important. By and large I would say the Board was relatively – actually, quite successful with Ned Keenan in terms of encouraging him to provide better and more support to Landscape Studies. I think Jan was not involved when I was – I left I think at the same time as Ned Keenan, so the only relationship I had with Jan was essentially when I came back as the Distinguished Senior fellow, and my relationship with him on a personal basis, both with he and his wife, was excellent. I'm not sure how much he has or hasn't provided support to Landscape Studies. I'm not in that loop anywhere as much as I used to be.
VKM: Was there anything you would consider a failure on the part of the Board?
PJ: Yes, I think our failure – and it's been a failure for a while; I don't think I would limit it to me or my contemporary colleagues – we have not been successful in interesting the profession and interesting the academics in more than a really tangential manner, interesting them in the work that Dumbarton Oaks Fellows are doing, the papers they're generating, etc. And I think that's a serious problem. Just to give you a little bit more background, I am a Fellow of the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects and the American Society of Landscape Architects. I was president of the Canadian Society, I write frequently for Landscape Architecture Magazine, and know the professionals very well. So I'm really linked in to the professional component, but somehow or other I just haven't been able to generate any kind of flow between Dumbarton Oaks and the profession, either in Canada or the States. So those that are linked in to Dumbarton Oaks are linked in through symposia, the occasional workshop or seminar, but it's a fleeting kind of relationship. It's not a very permanent one. And that's a failure.
VKM: That actually segues very nicely into discussing Garden and Landscape Studies as a field, because you're certainly not the only person to talk about that as a problem at Dumbarton Oaks. Are there any other really systemic issues in the way Dumbarton Oaks interacts with the field of Garden and Landscape Studies?
PJ: Dumbarton Oaks, I think, is largely centered around supporting researchers to do research that they want to do. And they select the researchers through the use of the Senior Fellows. So the process is basically quite inward looking. There isn't really, for instance, a program to develop research in contemporary landscape architecture, and therefore by a "thing" that you may or may not select as a Fellow. So each year we get a package of about forty, or let's say forty or fifty candidates, who are asking for Dumbarton Oaks's support of their research interests, and we pick the six, eight or ten ones that seem to us to be the most interesting and useful. Not useful, the most interesting intellectually. Obviously, of that group, I would say the majority would probably not be of any direct interest to the profession. And that's where the disconnect occurs, and I'm not sure it occurs anywhere nearly as severely, let's say with Pre-Columbian, where the academic, professional, and research communities are more tightly knit, better integrated, than they are in Landscape Studies.
VKM: Do you think the Garden and Landscape Studies Center here is doing anything to address that?
PJ: Well, I think one of the things Jan did by selecting the current Director of Studies is to say, "Well, first of all we've got to get a better link with the Graduate School of Design, and second of all we've got to get someone in here who knows more about the general professional field." This is not a knock on John Dixon Hunt and not a knock on Michel Conan, but neither one nor the other was particularly linked in to the profession. And unfortunately, although both have sparkling academic backgrounds and careers, and both are good friends, and I have a huge amount of respect for both, they just didn't create the link with the profession that they hoped to. I think Jan's choice of Beardsley was basically to try and increase the opportunities to make that link. It's going to be a long row to hoe because Dumbarton Oaks has established a kind of standoffish relationship with the academic and professional community, which makes this attempt to establish better relationships a little more difficult. I don't think it's a one-way problem, incidentally; I would not in any way whatsoever say, "Well, all of the problem is because of Dumbarton Oaks;" that's simply not true.
VKM: What do you think were some of the major changes in Garden and Landscape Studies during your time at Dumbarton Oaks?
PJ: I think the most important change was to divest the program of its Euro-centric focus. The introduction of a preoccupation with Japanese, Chinese, Persian, Indian, and Latin-American landscapes, and in my case also perhaps the Northern landscapes, Arctic landscapes, really moved Garden and Landscape Studies away from the Italian villa, the French château, and the English country garden, and expanded that kind of paradigm to a much, much broader focus on landscape. I think that's extremely significant. Again, it requires much more support than is available at Dumbarton Oaks. There's no question in my mind that the program is undernourished, and I think that the most significant change has been that shift away from what I guess you would call classical historical studies of garden and landscape to a much broader focus.
VKM: OK. Do you remember any important collaborations with other institutions in Garden and Landscape Studies?
PJ: And Dumbarton Oaks?
VKM: Yeah
PJ: No. There has not in my mind been a specific collaboration between Dumbarton Oaks and, let's say, the University of Illinois. What there has been is an attempt, through workshops and symposia, to bring together a number of professors of landscape architecture and Dumbarton Oaks to see whether or not it was possible to create a more supportive environment, if you will, between the academic community and Dumbarton Oaks. But in terms of specific institutions, other than, for instance, the University of Pennsylvania because John Dixon Hunt was at one point the Director of Studies and then became a professor at the University of Pennsylvania – obviously there's a link but it certainly wasn't a formal one.
VKM: How would you view the place of Dumbarton Oaks in the larger context of the Garden and Landscape Studies field?
PJ: It really does depend on how large you want to think of Garden and Landscape Studies. In terms of a research center, amongst committed historians and researchers, there's no question that it is one of the key centers of that kind of work. There are at least three that I know of in China that are comparable, they've been around longer, have many more staff, etc., etc., certainly one in Japan. So, it would be incorrect to say that Dumbarton Oaks is the only center of this kind of study, but I would say that it's certainly one of the most important for the production that it has supported of research and for its own publications, which is a whole other issue. The publications field is something where Dumbarton Oaks really was very much in the forefront at the beginning of the seventies and the eighties, by the nineties it was rolling along on its own steam. And then when Michel Conan arrived, instituted symposia, published the symposia proceedings in a fairly regular manner, these documents became available to, I think, a larger community, but it's still a modest impact. The website, and here Ned Keenan really did have an impact, the number of so-called "hits" on the website for the material that comes out of Garden and Landscape Studies really has increased substantially, and I think that's very much a question of the website initiative taken at the time I was there.
VKM: Do you think that there's any sort of obligation on the part of Dumbarton Oaks to the field in terms of shaping the direction of research, or I guess setting new trends in the field, because of its stature?
PJ: I think its stature is exaggerated. I think that in the same way that I sometimes actually giggle when they assume that Harvard is the best university in America – you know, it's nice, it feels good, I'm a graduate so that makes me very important because I went to the best university in America. All of this of course is nonsense. I think that Dumbarton Oaks has an obligation to respect its mandate, and I really believe it does respect its mandate, which is to be supportive of research, which is the generation of new knowledge, in the three fields for which it is endowed. I think that it has broken the mold when it started, and certainly across a number of Directors of Study. I think Michel Conan definitely expanded the so-called field of Garden and Landscape Studies into areas that it hadn't yet been associated with, and I think that is the role of a place like Dumbarton Oaks. I think it's fulfilled that role very well, but once again, I have to caution, I'm on the inside looking out, and when I'm on the outside looking in, I'm not sure that Dumbarton Oaks has had as much impact as it ought to have had, given what it's done. That may be a question of marketing, and marketing is an area in which I have zero expertise, but I suspect that Dumbarton Oaks has done its job well, thoroughly and properly. But I also suspect that the impact has not been as large as it might be.
VKM: So, if I start wrapping up now, do you have any memories, positive or negative, that stick out in your mind about Dumbarton Oaks?
PJ: Well, the only negative memory I have, and it's sort of silly, is the enormously hierarchical issues with respect to security and everything else. I would say that's a pain in the butt, if you will excuse the expression. But for the most part I would say the physical environment is exceptional, the social environment for me was extremely positive, I was happy to meet many of the colleagues as Senior Fellows that I had not known before. I think there's a wealth of interesting people at Dumbarton Oaks that people never get to meet, and that can be the Director of Buildings and Grounds, which turned out to be a person living in the Senior Fellows Building with me when I was there the last time, who's a bright, incredibly interesting person, as were many of the other staff of Dumbarton Oaks – and of course by and large the scholars and the staff don't mix. And that's too bad, because there are a whole lot of people in both communities that are really exceptional people. I would say the physical setting, the people, the museum, the music, the library – it's a little bit of a paradise. In fact, it's probably an environment that's so interesting that I'm not sure it would be a productive place to be for a long time. It's sort of like the Princeton Center of Advanced Studies, where people just sit and think. There isn't too much tension with respect to students aggravating you and colleagues fighting over how much toilet paper ought to be distributed in the bathrooms, that kind of stuff. No, the many times that I did spend at Dumbarton Oaks over probably a twenty year period I have to say were very positive, very fond memories.
VKM: Is there anything that I've left out that you would like to add?
PJ: I doubt it.
VKM: Well, good!
PJ: I guess I have two stories for you and then I'll stop. One is that I got so aggravated with the color-coding of the lanyard for security that my wife beaded me a lanyard in which all of the different colors were put on the lanyard, and I could pass myself off as a Junior Fellow, a Senior Fellow, a distinguished this, an undistinguished that, so that was one story. And the other story was when Michel Conan resigned – not resigned, I mean, I don't know what he did, but at the end of ten years, I think he resigned, yeah, as Director of Studies; he was Director of Studies for ten years, which is a long time – we had a wonderful small little party for him amongst the Fellows and Senior Fellows, and we gave him a garden gnome. We inscribed it and then hid it in the garden; I have no idea if it's ever been discovered, but somewhere in Dumbarton Oaks there is a garden gnome that's dedicated to Michel Conan, and I hope we hid it well enough for it to remain hidden for quite a while.
VKM: I'll ask the gardeners if they've seen it.
PJ: OK! Anyway, that pretty much is a good summary of my time at Dumbarton Oaks.
VKM: Thank you very much!]]>
LO: Your welcome. It's a pleasure.
VKM: OK. So according to our records you joined the board of Senior Fellows in Garden and Landscape Studies in 1984 is that correct?
LO: I think so. It seems right.
VKM: OK. How did you first come to be involved with Dumbarton Oaks?
LO: Well, I had become the chair of the Landscape Architecture Department at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard in July of 1982, I believe. So, about a year later it was suggested by someone, I don't know who, that I might become a member of the Fellows at Dumbarton Oaks. And I think it was probably the thought that it would be good to have a tie to the school of design and to landscape architecture, which I think was a good idea. And I think that it's appropriate that someone from the Design School who knows about landscape be involved at D.O., just help the scholars have some sense of what's going on in the field currently and what some of the needs and gaps and also strengths of the teaching is at the moment.
VKM: So what were your initial –
LO: Well, I'll tell you the other thing – how was I nominated? Well, I would suspect it was because Betty MacDougall was then the head of the Garden Library, whatever it was called, the name escapes me –
VKM: I think that it was Garden Library.
LO: I think Hank Millon was one of the Senior Fellows at the time too. You can check that.
VKM: He was, yeah.
LO: Well, Hank was the Director of the American Academy in Rome when I was a Fellow there before he came to CASVA. You know what CASVA is right? OK. And Betty I'd known in Rome also at the Academy and so they knew me from the seventies in Rome. And once I became sure of Harvard I think they thought, "Oh, he'd be a useful connection." So I think that's how it worked.
VKM: Can I ask what you were doing in Rome? What you were working on?
LO: I was a Fellow in Landscape Architecture for two years. And as an independent study you do whatever you feel like as long as the jury thinks it's worth sending you. So I ended up basically teaching myself an awful lot about the history of landscape design in Rome both Classical period and in the Renaissance and after. But I was also working – I also had a Guggenheim and I was working on the study of the eighteenth-century landscape in England. And one of the things that I discovered while I was there was that most of the history books are all wrong. The remark of Pevsner's that the landscape garden was one of England's only original contributions to the history of world art I discovered was totally inaccurate, and that actually there was what we would call pastoral and landscape gardens in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. They were well known by people at the time, and are now nonexistent, except you can find fragments of them and all that. That's how I got to know some of these scholars, was because I was interested in that. And so for a practitioner – and so the Academy, Betty and Hank and all these people obviously taught me pretty much how to be a scholar which I didn't set out to be, but anyway. You wanted to know what I was doing in Rome, that's what I was doing.
VKM: So –
LO: So, that meant to people like them at D.O., I was one of those odd creatures who was in practice, was teaching, and knew something about history.
VKM: Wow, the complete package.
LO: Well, maybe – lot's of gaps.
VKM: When you did first come to Dumbarton Oaks what were your initial impressions?
LO: Well, I knew the facility, the physical facility of course, because I had lived and worked in Washington, D.C. from '74 to '76 - '77 on some urban design stuff, and I stayed in Georgetown with friends and worked there. So, I, you know, went up to D.O. and saw it, and I knew about Beatrix Farrand and her design work and all that. And so I knew it as a place that was important in the history of American landscape architecture. And then I also had things like Stravinsky's Dumbarton Oaks, a little, beautiful little post-Bach thing of which you must know. So I was very interested in the Blisses, I thought that they were interesting people and the fact that they sponsored all this stuff. And there was of course the little Phillip Johnson Gallery for Pre-Columbian stuff, which as an architect I thought it was an interesting and odd little building. So I knew about D.O. as a physical place, and so when I went as a Fellow it was kind of interesting to be on the inside and to discover the other building – there's that off site building for Fellows, which I thought was kind of dopey. And that there was – the Garden Library was also in a basement or something, and they were treated like orphans; I just found it very interesting. And I found the other people to be intellectually stimulating and fun to be with.
VKM: Had you been to any of the symposia before you became a Fellow?
LO: No, I had not. I knew of them because I had some of the publications. I had about three of the early books.
VKM: OK. So were there any particularly memorable projects that you worked on in conjunction with Dumbarton Oaks?
LO: I would say that the most important thing was our meetings where we determined fellowships. That was the main purpose – that they would gather the Fellows, and we would review all the applications for fellowships. That was, you know, that was like giving away money to bright people and figuring out how much you have, and who you can give it to, and what you thought of the projects. And those discussions were, I think, remarkable and wonderful and actually helped shape the emerging field of history of landscape architecture in that period very much under Betty's leadership, and where we chose to push the money and to whom. The other thing was that we also sat around and tried to figure out what the symposia would be. People would have proposals and ideas, and we'd try to figure out how in God's name to make them happen and who would – if you did a symposium on say Moorish Gardens – who would be invited and how you'd get them to come and all that. So there was a – the Fellows were involved in the creation of the ongoing program, I'd say.
VKM: So –
LO: So, the other thing is, I think after I left – I can't remember when it was – I think it was sometime after I left –
VKM: Was this the article?
LO: No. I was asked about the physical place and I recommended Meade Palmer to help with the – I think it was Meade I recommended – I recommended a landscape architect to help them with the garden itself, who then helped them for quite a few years. I think he died later. The garden was in a state of disrepair and needed someone to come help them with the ongoing direction and maintenance, you know, how to plant and re-plant and how to edit and all that.
VKM: Were you –
LO: So, I felt pleased to have helped them with that.
VKM: I know they were trying to restore the garden to Beatrix Farrand's original plans, were you –
LO: To some degree. Well, I helped send them people to work on it, but I was not involved myself at all.
VKM: OK. So at some points there has been tension between Harvard and Dumbarton Oaks-
LO: I'm sure.
VKM: Did you ever get a sense of the prevailing feeling towards Harvard while you were at Dumbarton Oaks?
LO: Yeah, I got the sense from Betty and a little from Giles Constable and then later after I left from John Hunt and others. I got the sense that there was a sense of, "Oh God, they are up in Cambridge, and they don't really know or care about us." I think Derek Bok as president of Harvard, under his administration I think they felt a little – on the one hand they had the blessing of being very independent, on the other hand they felt like, "You're this big rich institution, where's all the help?" I did get that sense. Nothing, I can't give you specifics, but there was that feeling. The real tension of course – which you ask about later in your little – is the relationship between Byzantine and Pre-Columbian Studies. Why? Therein lies a lot of probably gossip and rumor and everything. That's a long story. I can say something about that when we come to it.
VKM: OK. That's interesting because I think they try to get along now.
LO: No, it was horrible. The whole institution as far as we were concerned had been hijacked by the Byzantine people. I mean, even the Pre-Columbian people felt, I think, a little bit, if not disenfranchised, certainly poverty stricken. I mean the Byzantine folks were just – I mean, truly Byzantine. The word means what it's from in English.
VKM: We can talk about that now. So did you get to interact with people from other departments very much?
LO: Virtually none. The directors had to. I would say, Giles Constable seemed like the gentleman and was very nice and he seemed very friendly, and I think he and Betty hit it off very well. That era was pretty good. Thomson I never knew. Angeliki, oh my God, she was really something, she was a killer. She was, I think, incredibly hostile toward the Landscape Department and there was tension over programs, tension over publications, tension over money. I mean it was very, very unpleasant. Part of that I think had to do, I think, with personalities. When John Dixon Hunt was the Director, I think he and Angeliki may have been affected. John was at one point married to a Greek woman who didn't – who felt Angeliki was a kind of aberration, out-of-control, lower-class person, and she was from the wealthy upper class. But later John ended up marrying the former wife of one of the Senior Fellows.
VKM: Oh my God.
LO: It was the sort of stuff that goes on in institutions that you read about. When I lived in Rome all the various marriages came apart and rearranged themselves. But I would say that the personal relationships between some of the people in Landscape and some of the people in the Byzantine program were absolutely uncomfortable. It was, I think, it was as much personalities – But it also led to huge rows about policy and money and programs. I think Pre-Columbians almost never came up in our radar, and a couple of us at one point thought, "Why don't we do a whole conference or symposium on Pre-Columbian Landscape" and we tried to do something like that, and at one point there was under one of the Fellows – one of the directors – a conference on Byzantine Landscape, that was I think a bit of a success and there's a publication and all that. There have been things, but not on my watch, I'll tell you that. OK?
VKM: OK. So, did you – You were here during the transitions between directors from – Were the transitions smooth? Were they problematic?
LO: I don't know because, you know, I would just go to these annual or semi-annual meetings of the Fellows where we would have a great time. We'd spend a couple of days reviewing things, being together, having meals, talking about the field and history and conferences. Or I would go to symposia, and those were always great fun, because all these people came who you knew and interesting talks and speeches and all that. So the events I went to were always very nice, and, of course, whoever was the director of all of D.O., whether it was Giles, Thomson, or Angeliki, would always turn up and be gracious and do a nice little speech and sit through the talks and that sort of stuff. So on the surface of course it always seemed fine. What was the question?
VKM: How were the transitions between the directors.
LO: I can say I wouldn't have known.
VKM: OK. Did you get to attend any of the symposia for the other programs or the concerts?
LO: No. And part of the reason for that is Washington, D.C. is a long way from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and even when I came back to Philadelphia after leaving Harvard and came back to Penn and living and practicing and teaching here, Washington, D.C. is still several hours away even by train, and you know I have to stay over in a hotel somewhere so it'd be rare. But the other thing is that we never ever got invitations or programs or a calendar of the events of the two other programs, ever. I've never received in my life a mailing telling me what the concerts are, what the programs are, what's going on with Pre-Colombian or Byzantine.
VKM: Oh.
LO: They may claim they do it. I'd like them to prove it because I don't think they ever really solicited the landscape folks. They may now, but they didn't then. I know of – it just never occurred to them.
VKM: I know you weren't physically at Dumbarton Oaks very much, but do you know if they tried to encourage socialization among the scholars?
LO: I believe – I don't know – When you say "they," I guess you mean –
VKM: Sorry, the administration.
LO: I think a couple of the directors. I think Thomson and Constable did. I have no idea about Angeliki. But I do know that the Fellows themselves by dining would – one tends to dine with the people you know and you are talking to and are working in your field – but, there's still, even my experience at the American Academy in Rome and other institutions, it's at the breakouts and at the meals that you actually see the other people and you socialize and everything like that. I suspect the Fellows did some of their own, but I don't know how much.
LO: That's usually how it works; I mean, the director can encourage it, but what are they going to do? Well, they have teas; they have afternoon tea right? They can go have a tea, but then you are standing around with the Fellows from your field usually. I don't know what your experience is.
VKM: Well, they've had coffee once or twice.
LO: Yeah, not much. I was always shocked they didn't use the house more. I couldn't figure out why they didn't use the house for more events. They have curtains down, doors shut, you know so people would meet wherever their program was or they would meet in the Fellows Building over to the side, over there. I was always puzzled. Because at I Tatti and at the Academy in Rome you used the historic facilities for the programs, you know. I mean, the lectures and the symposia do use the house, but that's about it in my experience. And I know they use it for the concerts.
VKM: Yep. Is it OK –
LO: Actually I have heard one concert there, now that I think about it. But it was a long time ago.
VKM: Is it OK to move on the Board of Senior Fellows?
LO: Sure, sure, sure. It's related, so much gossip about that.
VKM: They love gossip.
LO: I know.
VKM: So, you were a member of the Board for six years. While you were there can you describe what you think the major responsibilities were?
LO: I did a minute ago, but I'll repeat it. And that was, it had to do with the fellowships and grants. Reading all the applications, discussing them among ourselves, coming to conclusions, and then, you know, awarding fellowships. That was one major thing, and the other was as I said, brainstorming about the spring symposia and then trying to help the Director with that. I mean, the Director quite often would bring proposals to us, and then we would kind of chew on them and think about them and often times end up supporting them. But generally what we were trying to figure out was, you know, if you are going to do that, how do we do it. That was the two main things we did I guess.
VKM: Did the process of selecting Fellows ever alter? I know they had like a very firm way of doing it in Byzantine –
LO: Well, you know, it's like, how do I explain this? I've been on lots of juries for many, many years. You know I've been reader for the Guggenheim and for various foundation grants and stuff. And so you know what happens is pretty straightforward. You sit around quietly and read everything for a while and then you have a conversation, and then you talk about how many fellowships do you have to give, and then you talk about plusses and minuses, and then you begin to narrow it down, and then you decide who to do. And so I would say, we would rate them in our own ways, but then we would discuss it, and we would come to an agreement. It wasn't a totally Quaker organization in terms of consensus and waiting for everybody to agree, but we also didn't have big rows, goading each other or stuff like that. It was a very collegial group who respected each other, but listened carefully.
VKM: Did you have rules about, you know, being able to talk about your own students or anything like that?
LO: Oh, people would acknowledge if they knew a person or something and then would say, but I don't think we ever had any real conflicts in that way, not in my day. But that's partly because there weren't many people teaching history of landscape anywhere. There weren't very many people doing PhDs in it. So the people who were coming to us were all kind of all over and weren't usually our students particularly. You follow?
VKM: Yeah.
LO: I mean, it's a much bigger field now than it was then. And we hatched this, you know, old generation now.
VKM: Did you ever work closely with any of the other members of the Board?
LO: Well as I said I had known Hank almost intimately. And I would say Mark Laird – no, I didn't know him before. I met Mark Treib there; I met John Dixon Hunt there; I met a whole bunch of people. There was a wonderful guy from Penn who was in Islamic and Moorish Studies. He's now retired, who was a very sweet guy. Then there was Naomi, what's Naomi last name?
VKM: Miller.
LO: Yeah, Naomi Miller was there. I met her. I think she's at BU.
VKM: I think she's emerita now.
LO: And then there was a very lively, wonderful woman from Yale who was in Art History there, what was her name? Anyway, I met a whole bunch of people, they were all enormous fun, but one of the things about them was since then several have become very close and dear friends, since because we've known each other ever since and done stuff, like Mark Treib and John Dixon Hunt and others. So does that answer your question?
VKM: Sure, if you want to talk about any projects after Dumbarton Oaks, that's cool too.
LO: Well, yeah. One of the things that happened out of D.O., having met some of these people when Benedetta Origo decided that she wanted to try and do something with her villa in Tuscany at La Foce, she asked Hank Millon at CASVA to round up some people to help her brainstorm and think about it. And Hank and John Hunt and I were part of the group that were rounded up. And out of that ended up coming the book project that John and I did with Benedetta and with Morna Livingston, the publication in the University of Pennsylvania Press series on La Foce. It was just kind of done to help them with their finances but also to kind of actually study it and know something about it, which I think it's been immensely helpful for her – its now in several languages, selling everywhere. What we did is that we put all the proceeds to go to La Foce. So there's a project that came out of people that I met there that had to do with the subject matter. I would say later on a search committee at Penn – well, I was on a search committee for D.O. for a new head, and we picked John Hunt – and then later I was on a search committee at Penn for a new Chair at Penn, and we picked John Hunt. So I helped John with a couple of jobs after. I mean he'd gone from D.O. to Bunny Mellon's, and then he and I have been closely involved teaching at Penn and doing various odds and ends and things.
VKM: Can I ask if you ever got to work with Wilhelmina Jashemski?
LO: No, I met her only once. She was a very dear friend of Betty's – Elisabeth MacDougall you would call her – but Betty and Wilhelmina were old buddies, and John and Wilhelmina turned out later – I guess she met him at some point. I don't think they were close, but they were professionally on very good terms and did a lot of stuff. I never actually knew her. A couple of my students knew her and worked with her.
VKM: That's a shame; she was apparently a great person.
LO: Well, Kathy Gleason, who was one of my students at Harvard and now teaches at Cornell applied for the Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture and the Landscape Jury sent her over to Classics and they gave her the fellowship to go work on classical landscapes, and she ended up working with Wilhelmina I'm sure a bit. So anyways, it's a family. So I never actually knew her that much.
VKM: You did work with – I'm assuming you knew Betty MacDougall pretty well.
LO: She was in Rome when I was a fellow in the seventies, '72-'74. And she was a great help to me. She and Georgina Masson, who is now dead, who's real name was Babs Johnson – anyway Georgina was a very influential scholar, kind of crazy American woman, who ended up in Rome after World War II – I don't know whether she was divorced or widowed or whatever. Babs and Betty both shared manuscript information with me; they shared research of theirs with me. They were very generous and helpful. And also, you know, steered me away from some mistakes and towards some really good stuff, and so I liked and trusted Betty. Betty was a difficult person; some people didn't like her. She was one of – oh what's his name – Wittkower's students, like Hank. She'd gone to the Institute in New York, where a lot of the great art historians have all gone and still go and come out of. And so the Institute of Fine Arts – it's in the Doris Duke mansion, up in the city there, in Manhattan, near the Met. And, Betty was a tough, well-trained scholar of Renaissance, and she was also a hard drinker and a tough burden. I hired her to teach history at Harvard for one year because I had this problem: the guy that had been teaching for me died. I hired Betty and she commuted from D.O. And the students found her really difficult. She was hard on the students because they were design students and weren't real scholars. They didn't read enough. She didn't want them to smoke in class. This is those days, you know. Anyway, she was a tough gal, but I loved her. She was very salty and very direct, but she knew everybody in Europe. She was, she first introduced Michel Conan and all people like that. She was a good soul. What was it like working with her? Fun, it was fun. She was hard on people, and we had an eternal fight with the – Betty and Hank and John and I fought with the administration at D.O. about – We wanted dust jackets on the books, and the Byzantinists and the Classicists were, "Well, we don't need dust jackets; we are not a trade rag you know. We have these nice cloth bindings with a stamp." They would have gotten leather bindings if they could've, but they were stuck with linen, right? We were saying, "Well we'll never sell any of our books, damn it, if you won't let us have dust jackets!" So that was one of our big fights. The challenge was trivial, but it was accomplished after our watch. Isn't that funny?
VKM: They fight over all kinds of things.
LO: Well, academia is a funny place, as you'll learn.
VKM: So, you were also involved in the search committee that eventually picked John Dixon Hunt, can you talk about that process?
LO: Well, it was the usual, you know. You round up a committee. You advertise. You get all these CVs, things come in. And then you think this is a funny crowd: we've got people who'd never touch us with a tenth foot pole, and then you have people that want the job but you don't want them, and then there are people that are interesting but they didn't apply, so you call around to see if they might be interested. The process was very much like any search committee, I'd say. And what it does is it raises issues about what sort of person do we want who will help with the program and fight for it within the institution, but who also understands the field and can help shape the field, which is of course what such a person does. And so, John was kind of a rising star at that point. He was back in England teaching, and we lured him. I mean, he would come – you know, he had been a Fellow. And we decided he had actually a better track record and more potential than the other candidates. It wasn't too hard to conclude at the time given the pool of people. Does that help?
VKM: Yeah. Talking about small things to fight about, I know that there was some controversy over the name of what we now call Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks. Did you have a take on that?
LO: I don't remember. It may have happened after I left. We may have just talked about it, but we didn't really fight about it, at least not to my memory, not the gang I was closest to. Our fight was about book jackets. But I think it was good to make it more than gardens because that's way too limiting. It was a thing just as it's been a struggle to get art historians to move past objects – it took a while to get them into dealing with the relationship of the art object to society and everything else – getting architecture historians to move past buildings – oh God what a struggle. And then once they fell in love with gardens and started doing gardens, we have to get them to understand that, well, gardens are just a piece of the designed landscape and as fancy and special as they are, there's this bigger milieu that is also historically and in contemporary terms deeply engaging and has to do with civilization and thought and all that and culture. It was a good thing that they did it, but people still don't know what landscape architecture is. My parents are in their grave not knowing what I do.
VKM: Can you describe what you would consider the greatest accomplishment of the Board while you were a member?
LO: I think we gave some very important fellowships to people who would become leading scholars and educators. One example would be a guy like James Wescoat at MIT. James Wescoat first came to us as this young landscape architect who was interested in water and wanted to do some – had started to do some work independently in India. Well now he's one of the leading authorities in the world on the Mughal water systems and hydrology and everything, and he's a fabulous guy. And we gave him his first start. And we gave many fellowships like that, I'd say, to people who have actually helped to shape the field. I feel very proud of that. And I think some of the symposia were wonderful and produced publications that have stood the test of being major contributions.
VKM: Do you think that there were any failures while you were there?
LO: Well, our biggest one was that we were unable to overcome the Byzantinists control of all the money, and resources, and public relations, and the Harvard connections. They really had their hand on it. So we were kind of starved of resources, I felt, and basically treated like orphans or poor cousins. I don't think we gave many bad fellowships. Once in a while you gave one to somebody who turned out to be a dud, but not very many. So failure in relationship building, I guess.
VKM: Is it all right for me to move on to –
LO: Yes that's fine.
VKM: In some of the other interviews people have talked about the division between academics and professionals in Garden and Landscape Studies as a problem with the field, but also in particular at Dumbarton Oaks. You are practicing landscape architect, right?
LO: That's right.
VKM: Do you have a perspective on how Dumbarton Oaks does address this?
LO: Let me think. The answer is, yes I'm practicing landscape architect. I'm also a person who teaches history, theory, and studio design, and drawing. So I'm kind of familiar with academia and have been teaching at Penn, and Harvard, and UVA, and Texas, and various places since I guess the '70s and still am. So I kind of know the field in two ways, and in the course of that I ended up meeting, knowing, hiring, working with, being friends of many people involved in scholarship, not only at D.O. but at the Academy. I was on the board of the American Academy in Rome for twenty years, and friends at I Tatti and I hung out at various places. And one of the things I'll say is, yes, it's true there is an awkward and sometimes unpleasant and sometimes very real and sometimes for good reasons gap between scholars and academics and historians and those who practice. It's real. And it's unfortunate, but it's hard to figure out what to do about it. And I will tell you that having read applications for the Guggenheim, and having sat on innumerable juries giving fellowships both at the Academy and at D.O., putting together juries, being on juries, doing all kinds of stuff – one of the things is that it's the rare practitioner who applies for such a grant or fellowship or a study period who makes the cut with the academics because they don't have a track record, they don't publish anything, and they quite often don't write quite as well. And they have not been trained to do research and scholarship usually. I mean, John and I spend a long time trying to get a sense if people can write because we are getting students coming through high schools and colleges and into graduate school and they still couldn't even write a proper paper and put together a beginning, middle, and end, that had a thesis and had grammar that worked, and all that. I mean, this is a problem. For you, as a product of Classics, you have spent many years reading and writing and are comfortable in a world of scholarship, I presume. For a lot of people who have what it takes to be a good designer, they are quite often extremely intelligent, but their intelligence is organized around thinking and solving problems and being perceptive about things in ways that are not necessarily verbal. And they haven't been trained to organize their thoughts around verbal structures very well. So, do you mind me going on like this?
VKM: Oh no. It's really interesting because you know people talk about, you know, "Oh it's a problem," but they don't say why.
LO: So here's the scoop, what happens is – I've had some of the best and most talented graduate students in design at Harvard and Penn over the last thirty years who now are leaders in the field, that are department chairs, won all these prizes, and built all this stuff; they are famous nationally and internationally. They are really intelligent and they read, but they are kind of like me, they are autodidacts. They are self-taught in what they've read, and they wander around and they have huge gaps and quite often they – some of my best students – they don't read a lot, they don't read enough. We're trying to help them know something about the history of their own medium because most of the great performers in most media – whether it's in music or literature or medicine, or, you know, whatever – they actually know a lot about their own predecessors. Picasso for instance knew more about the history of art, you know, he ransacked, he knew Velázquez, he knew Degas, and he knew the Pompeian stuff. The really great people know their field cold, but they are not scholars. When some of these people apply to us, they'll have an instinct they want to learn about something or go somewhere or do something, and sometimes they – because they are so clearly smart – they have a great portfolio, and they have a project that seems, well yeah, let's let them do that. So occasionally you'll get a designer who makes the cut with the academics. But the academics will basically be pretty harsh towards proposals that aren't well written. They'll say, "Well, this is a great project, but can this person do it? I don't think this person can do it. Too bad we don't have a somebody who wants to do this project." Or you'll have somebody who's a good person, but the project is stupid because, well, they don't know that this has been covered in the literature, you know, twelve books on that came across my desk last year. This guy is a great designer, but it's already been done. So, that's part of what happens, you see, in these reviews. I can tell you that, oh, the meetings in the Guggenheim over a period of about ten years, probably two or three designers got a fellowship in what goes under the rubric of architecture and all the rest went to superbly qualified post-doctoral folks or people who are working on the book that was going to summarize their career or do something. And so the difference between a really hot designer who wants to go off and spend a few months doing something, or, you know, a year, rooting around in some area because he's curious and wants to find out or wants to do a study or something, when they compete with someone who's coming from – was s student of someone at the Fogg or something, they don't stand a chance. Does that help you? And it makes sense, but it also means that it should also be made clear that, oh well, this is a scholarly institution and that those designers who are interested in being in this scholarly institution have to find something that would actually be a success for them and the institution while they are there. One has to find a way to explain that to them.
VKM: Do you think that the –
LO: But let me – one more thing. There are – in the past thirty years, in my experience, there have a been a series of people who started out as designers, were trained in it, may or may not have practiced a little, may or may not have taught a little, but who really ended up going and becoming academics and scholars. One would be Kathy Gleason, for instance, who I mentioned, who's done a lot of work in – what is it – gardens in Palestine or in Lebanon or Syria – it's in Syria. So she's worked with classical archeologists on sites and done a lot of stuff, written, teaches. But she started out as a student of mine in landscape design at Harvard in the Landscape Architecture Department, but started taking courses up at the Fogg. And James Ackerman, now Emeritus from Harvard and one of the great Renaissance definitive studies of Michelangelo, James and I basically helped train her so that she ended up becoming a real scholar. James Wescoat, who I mentioned, who's now at MIT, also started as a designer and has become, you know, a foremost historian, archeologist, teacher, etc. of others in a particular areas of the Indus Valley – is one of the leading figures. Designers can do it, it's not that they can't do it, but it's only a few and they are rare and they are on their way to being a hybrid person anyway. That's probably more than enough on that topic.
VKM: Do you think that while you were a Dumbarton Oaks people thought about that issue?
LO: I think we talked about it occasionally, everybody sort of understood it. I mean Mark Treib began as an architect and ended up being involved with landscape architecture even while on the faculty at Berkley as an architect. He ended up running all these conferences and symposia and everything that's been written on landscape. He's a person that started and then became something else. Hank Millon was trained as an architect and then became interested in history and then went and studied with Wittkower, so he's a person that came over from the design side. And I was there. So, we had people who actually knew both and understood it. So, we didn't have to talk a lot about it among ourselves. It wasn't a group only of people trained in academia.
LO: But I don't know who some of the Fellows have been lately. I know – Is Beardsley now the head of the –?
VKM: Yeah.
LO: John, yeah. He's a person who has taught in design schools and comes out of design and has written about art, site art, and a lot of other things, quilts, God knows what else. John's an interesting hybrid himself and so he should be sympathetic to the dilemma. I think when Michel Conan was there – he's a real European intellectual, French scholar of the old school, and yet knows a lot of designers, but I think he could keep it sort of straight. But it's hard when you don't get enough – if you get a series of applications from one side that is so strong and then dribs and drabs from the other that's weak, you know. I don't know what they are doing about it now. We didn't talk about it a lot because it was something we knew about. We tried to help when we could.
VKM: What do you think were some of the major changes in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks during your time there?
LO: Changes – well, I think we helped broadened the scope of the field of study, from simply bounded gardens as classically understood and defined to larger landscape issues as more broadly defined. Some of which I mentioned here, things like the infrastructure of hydraulic systems in agriculture for instance. I think we helped widen the field by the fellowships we gave and also by encouraging people to apply and how we were interpreting things.
VKM: Are you aware of any important collaborations with other institutions in Garden and Landscape Studies with Dumbarton Oaks?
LO: I'm not. I mean I personally have – I think most of the Senior Fellows usually have other institutional relationships, so Dumbarton Oaks de facto has some contact with their parent institutions, if you follow me. But, official collaborations – I don't know of any, and, in fact, very little with, say, the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, the one that would be the easiest you'd think for it to have.
VKM: You'd think and yet –
LO: Where did you do your study, by the way, in Classics?
VKM: Yeah, at Harvard.
LO: Where were your classes?
VKM: Boylston Hall.
LO: Boylston? OK. Just curious.
VKM: It's a really pretty building. How would you view the place of Dumbarton Oaks in the larger context of the Garden and Landscape Studies field?
LO: Oh, I think it's like one of the flagships: because of all the people who've come and gone there, because of their symposia, because of their publications, because of the Fellows which they send off into the world. I think it has quite a major role in the evolution and development of garden and landscape studies in the twentieth century and now the twenty-first. There's no question about it. Other places have come and gone and folded. One thinks of – I can't even think of its name now, up the Hudson River from New York – Wave Hill came and went. It foundered financially. It was a repository for landscape records and library and study. It's collapsed. There are various universities that have PhD programs that are producing people, like Illinois, Berkeley, and Yale, and Penn occasionally, and Harvard occasionally. But you turn to Europe and you say, "Well, what is there comparable?" And I defy you to think of something. There are universities where there are faculty members, or there will be a conference or symposium, but there is nothing quite like it. The only thing that I could compare it to are the American Academy in Rome or I Tatti, which are centers for advanced study, or CASVA or something like that. Right? Can you think of anything else by the way? Has anyone else told you anything else?
VKM: Peter Jacobs said that there are places in Asia that are similar, but you know not in the English-speaking world.
LO: I'm not sure – well, I know Peter and I'm not sure what he's thinking of. There's a center in Hong Kong in a University there, but I just think of it as mostly like a University with some Fellows and things. And the department that's set up at Tsinghua in Beijing, there is nothing in Beijing like it. There's tons of universities and centers and this and that, but – Shengming Ma is trying to set up an academy in Shanghai right now like the American Academy in Rome that would have some of the features of Rome, I Tatti, and D.O., that I don't think it's fully fledged yet. So that's interesting.
VKM: You'd have to ask him.
LO: So I think in the larger context, Betty and John and Michel – basically I think they have helped invent and develop a huge field internationally that now may run off in all directions and leave them sort of as a funny island. But I think its role has been enormous.
VKM: Do you think that Dumbarton Oaks has a reputation that is consistent with that role that it's played?
LO: I don't know. I think it should. I guess de facto the old guard knows. I don't know what the younger scholars might think. They probably think that the action is somewhere else these days. I don't know.
VKM: Did you continue to interact with Dumbarton Oaks when you finished your term on the Board of Senior Fellows?
LO: I did off and on. I was invited and I still am invited frequently to come do things and rarely can I. I attended several – how can I say – I went to some symposia. I actually gave a paper that was in one of the publications, and that was great fun, on regionalism. It's a paper that I'm actually quite proud of.
VKM: Do you mind if I ask about that? Because there's an entire folder, like a file-folder about liable issues with that paper…
LO: Really? Interesting. No one told me about it.
VKM: I don't know, there was some issue.
LO: I must have made some rude remarks. I wonder what they would be?
VKM: I think you named a client, and they were afraid that the client would sue or something like that.
LO: Well, they never did. Actually, I'm still working for him, that client. That's all right. I've been working for him for over twenty years. I was out with him out West last week. I've actually ripped up part of the garden and re-done part of it. They can relax. He would like somebody to write about him, he would like a whole book on him. I can tell you that. I usually think those things through before I do those things. I guess they didn't have any release and that's what made them nervous. Oh well. The paper was a little bit too long, but anyway – What else was I going to say? I also went back for, who was it? Oh, it was when Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, I can never say – anyway, when Joachim – we didn't mention him in our discussion – when he was Director, he published some interesting stuff himself. I have the suspicion that he may not have been thought of as the most successful Director they ever had, but I think he had a shorter period of time for whatever reason. But I liked him, he was a bright, I though – he was a quite young thing and interesting. But he invited a lot of people to come every so often and just come sit around and have conversations, that weren't just Senior Fellows meetings but he would just call up people and get people from all universities and get to for a weekend to come down and spend a day just talking about a topic. And those were fun. And we talked about – I'm trying to remember what they were about, I can't remember. That's where I first met people like Bernard Lassus, for instance – I met in one of those chats, who then later John hired to teach at Penn. Bernard was never on the Board with us. I don't know if you know him but he's this very interesting French landscape architect. But various people would come from UVA or, you know, various schools and we would sit around and talk, and people like Peter Jacobs would make it and myself. We had some very interesting conversations about aspects of the field or aspects of scholarship in the field or theory in the field. And that was, I thought – those were very good. At one point, God, I was on this advisory group to the NEA Design Arts Program for many years also, and we had some relationships with some of the people who were at D.O. Well, I think that's about it.
VKM: Do you have any memories, either positive or negative, that stick out in your mind about Dumbarton Oaks?
LO: Oh yeah, positive, several. I'd say memories of the meetings and the discussions and the debates are extraordinarily positive. The sense of helping shape the growth of scholarship in a field that one had discovered and was helping to invent, that was exciting and fun. That's very positive. Great feelings towards many of the people I spent time with. That's the only thing that I ever missed about Harvard after I left was some of the people and the conversations we'd have. You know, lunch with Nelson Goodman from the Philosophy Department. The great fun of talking to other people that were so smart; that was fun. I also – I personally learned an enormous amount from many of these people, in terms of my own growth. At one point, I wrote a – I panned a book by one of the other Fellows in a review, that was an interesting moment. I thought he was bright and sharp. I hated the book and I thought the publisher really screwed him with terrible reproductions. So that was an interesting – it wasn't bad for me; I think it may have been for him. Negative, I don't really have any negative feelings about it, about my time there or my efforts. I thought those of us who went and participated I think everyone appreciated our effort. It was its own reward; it was great. I loved the place. Physically, I just thought it was a fabulous place to be and hang out. I love the gardens.
VKM: It's really beautiful here. Is there anything that I've left out that you would like to add?
LO: No, I wish it well. I hope John is a success. I haven't seen him for a while. I'm fond of him. I feel out of touch, but given my practice and my life it's reasonable, I guess, that it would be a bit.
VKM: I'll tell him you said hi.
LO: Say "hey" for me and tell him I love him. And keep me on a mailing list or something, OK?
VKM: OK. Well, thank you very much.
LO: Well, you're welcome and good luck to you. What are you going to do with all of this? It makes me nervous saying all of this [laughs].
VKM: Well, it will be published and used to create an institutional history. It's hoped to capture important moments in D.O.'s history.
LO: That reminds me of the huge controversy for a new building there for a gallery museum building. Oh my God, I was one of the people who opposed it and was vociferous and was public about my opposition. Along with many others, by the way – I can't take all pride for having stopped the project, but what a terrible idea.
VKM: Where did they want to put it?
LO: First they were going to start with an above-ground thing, and then they ended up with a below-grade thing and they were going to put it, you know how you come out of those French doors unto that grass terrace and grass steps towards Rock Creek Park? Yeah, they were going to put it under that lawn, I think they were trying to get it under there.
VKM: I think that's where they were thinking of building the library.
LO: It was a library, yeah – anyway, I was one of the people that helped stop it. It was a terrible idea.
VKM: They have a library now, like a new one.
LO: It's above ground and across the street, right? Where is it?
VKM: No, it's, like, behind the, I guess, what used to be the Fellows Building?
LO: It's off to the side, what I would call, I guess, west. But it's not in Farrand's garden. I think it's where the parking lot used to be.
VKM: It might well be.
LO: The guy who was the architect for that, Warren Cox of Hartman-Cox, is an old colleague and friend of mine, who I actually hired when I was doing the landscape for the Washington Monument after 9/11, when they asked me to solve the security problems. I did most of it – for one part it was unsolvable. But when I redid the grounds for the Washington Monument I hired Warren who was the architect for that Dumbarton Oaks project. So I absolutely thought what a terrible idea, they were going to wreck Farrand's garden basically, and with all the exit stairs and ramps and smoke exhaust and cut down all these trees – anyways just a horrible idea. And so we stopped that, a bunch of us. So, for all my love of D.O., some administrations have gone off in funny directions. Anyways, that's it.
LO: OK? So my best wishes to everybody. To John and to the new Director, who – he's probably been these for a bit, but I wish them all well. I think it's a great institution that needs love and help. And I wish them well with their strange parents at Harvard.
VKM: Before I let you go, can I get a snail mail address so I can mail you the consent form?
LO: Sure it's LaurieOlin@olin –
VKM: Oh no, like a –
LO: No, no, now I'm – It's suite 1123, The Public Ledger Building, which is 150 South Independence Mall West, Philadelphia, PA 19106. And you will clean up my remarks about people and their ex-wives, I presume, to some degree. I guess you taped it all, so whatever.
VKM: Taped it all.
LO: OK, well, there're a lot of people's private lives that have gone up and down in institutions. This one is no different than the others. Everyone's lived through it as far as I can tell. OK?
LO: Bye-bye and good luck to you with the rest of your project.
VCM: Thank you very much.
LO: OK. Bye.]]>
AH: Oh, you're welcome.
VKM: So, according to our records you first had a junior fellowship in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in 1992; is that correct?
AH: Right, I think the fall semester of that academic year.
VKM: How did you first come to be involved with Dumbarton Oaks?
AH: I had had a fellowship, a one-month fellowship at the Huntington, and at that time Amy Meyers, who is now the Director of the Yale Center for British Art – at that time Amy was the curator of American art at the Huntington. And Amy, as you might be aware, is an important scholar of natural history and has done many projects relating to garden history. And Amy had brought Dumbarton Oaks to my attention and thought that it would be a great institution, knowing that, actually, I was about to move to D.C. – it would be a great institution to be affiliated with, and it would be a wonderful opportunity to apply and also to use the library and go to lectures and things like that.
VKM: OK. What were your initial impressions of the institution?
AH: Oh that's a wonderful question. It's certainly impressive with the gardens and with the whole building. It seems very – more European than American, and the Museum and the collections and the special Garden Library. It all seemed sort of otherworldly.
VKM: Can you describe what your typical day was like as a Fellow?
AH: I would say most of it would be spent reading, and taking notes, and writing and discussing, and there was probably a fair amount of coffee in there as well.
VKM: Who would you be discussing with?
AH: Well in both cases. I ended up spending a lot of time talking with my other colleagues or Fellows at the same time. In that fall, Tim Davis and I shared an office and then Grey Gundacker was next door. I think – particularly Tim and I were both writing our dissertations, so I think there's certain camaraderie around being in the same place. I think, we're also – all three of us – were very much interested in thinking about landscape as a place in which cultural, social, economic, political issues are articulated and thought over and contested. A lot of it was really, you know, kind of bouncing ideas off each other about methodology, but also about specific summer individual projects and how to frame it, and the evidence we had at hand, so a lot of those kind of discussions.
VKM: Aside from being on the same floor and offices, was there any attempt made to encourage socialization among the Fellows?
AH: Sure. Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn was the Director then, and, you know, I think I remember him inviting us to have a drink in the garden. Also, you know, because you all had lunch together, when we first started, he would come over and say, "Let's go have lunch now." I think he very much – not in a heavy handed way, but in a kind of behind the scenes way more – encouraged us to do that.
VKM: Did any of the other Fellows have impromptu get-togethers?
AH: Oh yeah. We also, at that time – we all had apartments up at the top of the hill there. I can't remember the name of the building. And so actually what would often happen is that we would leave at the same time – and there were a lot of restaurants outstretched there – and we would get something to eat on the way home. We'd be a little more expansive. I remember doing a lot of things with people in Pre-Columbian Studies, you know, we went out to eat. In Byzantine, now that I think about it, there was sort of a group of us that were working on our dissertations, and so I also remember one night going some place and they were teaching – what kind of dancing was it? Anyway some form of, not line dancing, something kind of corny. Was it tango? – doing those sorts of things too. I don't know how – I think through lunches and just getting to know each other at the center then we just – you know Dumbarton Oaks – then we just started spending more time together. I used to go running with somebody from Pre-Columbian Studies to Rock Creek Park. So you just find people with similar interests.
VKM: OK. You mentioned that you were sharing an office with another scholar. Were there any other scholars or other Fellows that you worked closely with or developed relationships?
AH: As I mentioned, the one in Pre-Columbian Studies, Mary Pye, I used to spend a lot of time with. And I think pre-Columbian studies is a similar – a lot of those people were dealing with similar issues about land and how a history of the land can tell you something about the culture, so I think there are some natural affinities there.
VKM: Did you ever work with any of the Senior Fellows or the Director Studies in Garden and Landscape?
AH: I don't remember who – oh yeah, the Director Joachim. In fact, I contributed an essay to the volume he edited on the wild garden, or the natural garden – I wrote on the wild garden. So yes, I definitely worked closely with him. And, I'm trying to remember who was the Senior Fellow that fall. I don't know why I'm blanking on that, but I guess it means I didn't work with them. I know Erik de Jong came the next semester in the spring when I wasn't a Fellow but I was still in D.C. and still using the library a lot. And I definitely would have interactions with him.
AH: Or maybe he was there in the fall too, and I'm just mis-remembering that he was only in the spring. You know, I mixed – I probably would have to see. But I do remember a lot of discussions with Erik de Young too. And then there were people who'd been Fellows the year before like Craig Clunas and Ned Harwood. Ned Harwood in particular would be back quite a bit so I would have conversations with him.
VKM: OK. So again, you mentioned a little earlier that you used to hang out with the Pre-Columbian people. Can you tell more about any social or professional interactions with the other departments of Dumbarton Oaks?
AH: Yes. So, I think I mentioned two sort of people that were doing their dissertations in Byzantine. I think there was sort of a natural gathering around what stage your academic career was in.
VKM: OK. Can you tell me a little about any of the people that you –
AH: So, the person that I remember the most – Dirk, I can't remember his last name –
VKM: Don't worry.
AH: And then there was actually someone who was, I don't remember exactly what her position was, she was like the curator of the Byzantine Collection and she had background and training in material culture. And, I spent a lot of time with her. And, actually the person that was head of the gardens at the time, I hung out with him as well because he knew plant history and plant culture.
VKM: Did you get the impression that the Director of Dumbarton Oaks or the Director of Garden and Landscape Studies was encouraging the fellows to interact with other departments?
AH: Oh, I think before you asked about the Director of Dumbarton Oaks, I was thinking more about the Director of Landscape Studies. Angeliki was the Director when I was there. And yeah, you heard a lot about how important interdisciplinarity was. I don't know – I'm not sure how much I would say that the institution encouraged it, whether how much was more intellectual interests and personality. Does that make sense?
VKM: Yes, yes.
AH: But you definitely had those colloquiums where you would hear each other present. I think that was an important way to foster connections because once you know something more about someone's research it's always easier to have a conversation with them.
VKM: So you did attend the colloquium and symposia for the other programs?
AH: Oh yeah. Do they not do that now? We all went to each others!
VKM: I think they do now, maybe earlier they didn't.
AH: No, we all went to each other's.
VKM: Do you remember any in particular?
AH: Not really.
VKM: More a moral support thing?
AH: Yeah.
VKM: Do you remember any symposia for Garden and Landscape Studies?
AH: So, obviously the Natural Garden one because I gave a paper in that one. And, I know I attended more than one and I remember meeting people. I think what was nice is that I also met a lot of people involved with the AIA, American Institute of Architecture, who'd come to those. I couldn't tell what the other topics were though, to tell you the truth. That was a long time ago!
VKM: Do you know of any important collaborations with other institutions in Garden and Landscape Studies?
AH: I though they did things occasionally with the National Gallery, with CASVA.
VKM: Did you ever go to any of those?
AH: Yeah, I'm sure I did. In fact I know they did one on Nazism and Landscape Design, I remember distinctly going to that one.
VKM: I think I read about that one. This is probably more something that the board would be able to answer. Did you get the impression that they wanted to do more collaborative projects?
AH: I think there was some reach-out to the Smithsonian. I couldn't tell you whether there was more or less. When you are working at an institution as a Fellow, you sort of – whatever they do, it's sort of natural. You don't think, "Oh, could they do more or less?" I couldn't say whether I have a distinct impression about that.
VKM: When you first came to Dumbarton Oaks the director was Angeliki Laiou, right?
AH: Right.
VKM: Did you ever have much contact with her?
AH: Very little.
VKM: Did you ever work with Ned Keenan?
AH: No.
VKM: OK. So when you were here, did you use the garden library or –?
AH: Yes. No, the garden one was 99%, and every once in a while there would be something over at Pre-Columbian.
VKM: What was the experience like then, because you know they have a new library now.
AH: Well, it was a little funny I thought because we were downstairs, you know, in the basement and you had to go through that weird hallway to get over to the Pre-Columbian side. So, it felt a bit like a rabbit warren down there. We used to joke about – Now this is going to sound mean so don't quote this! But we used to joke, how come the Byzantine people get the windows and they only care about the past, whereas the garden and Pre-Columbian people that care about landscape were buried in the basement! But I'm sure everyone had their own particular point of view.
VKM: Yeah, that point of view about the Byzantinists was not uncommon. Have you been back since they built the new library?
AH: No.
VKM: It's very pretty.
AH: Oh, I look forward to seeing it!
VKM: During your first fellowship, I can't pronounce his name Joachim—
AH: Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn?
VKM: Yeah – was Director of Studies in Garden and Landscape, and then it was Michel Conan.
AH: Yes, yes.
VKM: Could you talk about how they were as directors?
AH: I think they both had different personalities. I think that was part of it. But, I mean, both, I think, really tried to make Landscape Studies into a truly intellectual endeavor; that they both shared. And I think they wanted to encourage and would help push – for want of a better word – people to really produce their best. But they had very different intellectual trainings. Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn was a little bit more of a social history, social-political history and Michel Conan, a little bit more of a linguistic, French theoretical background. And, probably my inclination was more towards the methodologies that Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn worked on. But it also might have been that they had shared topics in common. So I enjoyed them both, but they were different as well.
VKM: OK. So at some points in the past there has been some tension between Harvard and Dumbarton Oaks over the control of various issues – financial ones. Did you ever get a sense of the prevailing feeling towards Harvard at Dumbarton Oaks while you were there?
AH: I wouldn't say I had a sense of the prevailing feeling. But at the same time I completely understand what you mean about the tensions. I think there was a sense that decisions were made from far away without understanding what was really happening on the ground, if that makes sense.
VKM: Yeah. In some of the other interviews people have discussed the division in Garden and Landscape Studies between academics and professionals as a problem in the fields and especially at Dumbarton Oaks. Do you have any thoughts on how Dumbarton Oaks has addressed that divide?
AH: Between? Can you just – let me listen to your question again? Between?
VKM: Academic, people who research Garden and Landscape Studies and those that practice –
AH: What you would call like a practitioner?
VKM: Yeah.
AH: You know, I'm not sure. I think Dumbarton Oaks has done a good job of doing that for some of the topics they've picked. And I'm sure at times one constituent has felt slighted over another, and I'm not sure there's a perfect balance for that. I think for me, maybe I'm less troubled by that than some people because I'm an art historian, and I have a lot of professional conferences that are studio and art history combined, and so that tension between those who make and those who study is prevalent all the time in those conferences. I guess in some ways I'm sort of used to it. And so if I hear people complain about it, I actually don't pay attention to it because I hear it often enough that I just think, well, that, you know, that's the nature of the beast.
VKM: Do you think there are any other systemic issues you know in Garden and Landscape Studies?
AH: I think this is something that Dumbarton Oaks can't do much about but I think their- [connection is cut off]
What did you last catch me say?
VKM: I mean it hadn't actually gotten to –
AH: Oh OK, so we got cut off before – I was just saying I think that one of the issues – but I'm not sure that Dumbarton Oaks can do much about it – is the job market. There are not a whole lot of positions for landscape historians as opposed to practitioners. On the other hand, I don't feel that it's Dumbarton Oaks responsibility to deal with that issue.
VKM: That's true.
AH: But it is a systemic issue for the field if that's what you are pointing to.
VKM: Do you think there's been any major changes in Garden and Landscapes Studies at Dumbarton Oaks either between your stays or since then?
AH: Yeah, I think there's been general changes overall. I think, I mean, there were certain points in which archeology was more of an emphasis than some other points. I think theoretical approaches were more important than at some other points. I mean, you could map ebbs and flows with that. But, I think overall what's been very exciting to see is the way in which Dumbarton Oaks has helped to ensure that landscape history is on par with other academic fields.
VKM: Have you followed at all the – there are some trends that have kind of popped up, moving towards globalization –
AH: Yeah, I mean, I run our humanity center and that's our theme for this year, so yeah. That's what I mean about keeping pace with it. I mean, on the other hand there are some topics that – I don't attend the symposium as much as I used to – there was for a while topics – I didn't understand what the topics were, or I wasn't interested in them.
VKM: Because they were getting further away from art history?
AH: Yeah, I wasn't sure what I would leave with at the end of the day. If I would see five examples that illustrate the same topic, well you've proven that that topic is important to me, but I haven't learned anything. Whereas, if you take an issue and plumb that issue, then I can leave at the end of the day with a more sophisticated understanding of an issue.
VKM: Do you remember any symposia topics or issues that are sort of illustrative of that?
AH: I don't know, I think there was – it's hard to say. Was there one on motion or something like that in the garden? I mean that was—
VKM: I did wonder what exactly they were doing with that one. What do you imagine the place of Dumbarton Oaks in the larger context of the Garden and Landscape field?
AH: I think because it offers the fellowship program, it's very well recognized for that. And because of the symposia and things along those lines, I think it's established a pretty important profile. You know, it's not the only place doing it. In some ways maybe it could connect more with other academic programs outside of Harvard. But I think that's not an easy thing to negotiate.
VKM: I guess – do you think that Dumbarton Oaks has been as important as you think it should be or more important than you think it should be or –?
AH: I think with any institution you always wish it could do more. I think with the resources it has – you know, it doesn't have a huge staff in Garden History, and I think for the amount of staffing it has I think it's done a pretty good job. So the question – I think the Directors in that area could be more prominent in other – I think it's very tempting you get very comfortable at Dumbarton Oaks. Should they be going to other conferences and being more visible? I don't know. But, I'm also in art history so, you know, just because I don't see them at those conferences – those probably wouldn't interest them.
VKM: OK. This is sort of a random question, but while you were here, did you go out to the gardens very much?
AH: Oh yeah, almost every day after lunch we would go. And then when I was there in the summer, of course we went swimming.
VKM: Yeah – the pool – everyone talks about that. Have you continued to interact with Dumbarton Oaks after?
AH: No, I mean, what I'm working on now doesn't have anything to do with it.
VKM: Fair enough. Do you have any memories, either positive or negative, that stick out about Dumbarton Oaks?
AH: Oh, I have very positive memories. I think the garden was positive. I think having interactions with my colleagues was extremely positive, and then just the absolute quality of the library. I could have not done my dissertation without that library. In that's sense, it's just constantly finding things that were useful and helpful. And the networking opportunities – since so many people would come through there to use the library or come to conferences. So I think those would be my top things that I remember.
VKM: OK. Is there is anything that I've left out that you'd like to add.
AH: Not really. I had looked through – but you've sort of touched on things that I was remembering.
VKM: OK. Well thank you very much for taking the time to speak.
AH: Oh, you are more than welcome. You are more than welcome. Good luck with your project!]]>
WHA: Thank you very much.
INT: July 17th.
INT: Oh, I'm sorry, yes, today's July 17th, 2009.
WHA: Everybody's in [laughter]. Did you get TJ in over there? [laughter]
INT: Oh yes, and Thomas Jefferson is presiding [laughter]. Which is very appropriate.
WHA: Where's his computer relay?, hanging on his – I assume my computer works wireless. When they were hooking it up, they said, where we gonna put it, and I said, just hang it around his neck, he'll love it.
INT: That's great. We'll start off with: you were never a junior fellow at Dumbarton Oaks?
WHA: No, no.
INT: So how did you first come to be involved?
WHA: Well, I was trying to remember all of that, how I – my first introduction to the whole Dumbarton Oaks scene was through Walter Muir Whitehill, who was a great friend of the Blisses, and who wrote what was considered the official sponsored history of Dumbarton Oaks. Do you know it?
INT: No, to our knowledge, we've been told that there's never been an official –
WHA: Not true. Walter Muir Whitehill, who was - well, I knew him through Boston connections, and he was a great friend of some of the Adams connections, obviously up there, and he was the head of the Boston Athenaeum, and very much involved, he was on the board of the art museum in Boston and the Massachusetts historical society, he was involved in everything, and at a very early stage in my life somehow I became a part of – I would see the Whitehills in Boston, and so I knew about the Blisses really second-hand but fairly intimately in terms of what they were doing. But his book is a very key document.
INT: I would imagine so. I'm not even sure there's a –
WHA: And Walter died in the late seventies, I think, so this book would have been done, well obviously before Mildred Bliss died in sixty-nine, but anyway he was very much an intimate. Then when I came to the National Gallery, I'd been living in Princeton and I was working for the Rockefeller Brothers Fund briefly before I came to the National Gallery, and it may have been through some Princeton connection that we then – Mrs. Bliss, though she had just died, was very much a social and cultural presence in Georgetown, which meant basically Washington. And Tom Bayard – does his name ring a bell? You've come on to him. He taught at Trinity I think, after he left Dumbarton Oaks, and he was a kind of protégé of Mrs. Bliss, and after she'd moved out of the house, down on Q – we were on P just around the corner – and Tom was a friend of friends of ours in Princeton so there were all these, I suppose not professional, but just sort of these connections, and we became good friends of Tom's, so I suppose that was really the first behind-the-scenes introduction, because the staff was very, very small.
INT: What year was this?
WHA: Seventy. Mrs. Bliss had just died. We're told in Washington that they were referred to as the "Three Bs" – Mrs. Bliss, Mrs. Bacon – Virginia Bacon, Mrs. Robert Lowe Bacon – and Mrs. Beale, who lived in Decatur House, opposite the White House – still living privately in that house. Mrs. Bacon was living in I think what had been John Marshall's house on F Street, pretty extraordinary, they were all contemporary buildings with the White House, and then Mrs. Bliss was out in the country. But those were really the powerhouse figures, and this is social history that has nothing to do with Dumbarton Oaks, but it's part of the texture. But we're into the transitional period of Dumbarton Oaks throughout the '70s. I think through Walter Muir Whitehill I became well acquainted with the Tylers, and it was Bill Tyler who asked me to be a senior fellow. And you know the Tyler connections to the Blisses.
INT: He was the godson, I believe.
WHA: Yes, and he was also the godson of Edith Wharton. And Edith Wharton was a great friend of Mrs. Bliss, and also Beatrix Farrand, and that's how Beatrix Farrand comes into the story, and I think that it was Royall Tyler, his father, that introduced the Blisses, I mean Mr. Bliss's mother, to Bliss's father.
INT: That was Royall Tyler?
WHA: She then became Mrs. Royall Tyler. [NB: It is unclear to whom he is referring.] So Bill – I always loved the fact that he was Edith Wharton's godson [laughter].
INT: And I think he was heir to all her papers and things.
WHA: He did, which he then negotiated – I think Yale has them now. I think that's right. I don't know, the Bliss papers, I suppose they're at Harvard?
INT: They were moved to Harvard. They originally were at Dumbarton Oaks, but Dumbarton Oaks didn't really seem to have the space or the resources.
WHA: And that's not – that kind of archival manuscript maintenance, it's just like at Monticello; we don't have any – other than a working library – we don't keep any manuscript material there. It all goes to the University of Virginia. Anything that has to be taken care of.
INT: We do have the material related to the building of Dumbarton Oaks and the gift –
WHA: You have all of that? But her plans, all of that is out in California.
INT: Oh, I didn't know that.
WHA: Well, she lived in California near the end of her life. So I know that a lot of the original garden plans, which have – all that's been documented, published, that's well-known. Well, anyway, that's the best of my recollection.
INT: Did you know Mrs. Paul Mellon as well?
WHA: Well, I did know her, and in fact when I was on the board there was discussion even then about the possibility of her giving her collection to Dumbarton Oaks, but it was clear that this was not going to happen in the 1970s, because her interests were clearly very special, and she did not want to have it being institutionalized under either Dumbarton Oaks or Harvard, and we still don't know where her collection is going to go – and maybe you do – or have not heard.
INT: I know that she's built a library.
WHA: She has, there, that's been a number of years ago. But it's not – it's fine for that but I can't imagine that being maintained in perpetuity. I suspect – I've heard rumors that there is another institution where maybe it would go, but I don't know any more than that. But she was never – was she actually ever on the board? I can't remember.
INT: I believe she was.
WHA: Her name was on it, but she – I think that she was never really active. It was with the idea I think that this would happen, but it was quite clear that this was not – that she was going in her own direction and so on.
INT: Yeah, we tried to speak with her –
WHA: No, I don't think it would make any sense now. She's 98. Her stepson is a good friend of mine – pardon me, her son by an earlier marriage – lives in Washington and is a good friend of mine, and I don't – people around Upperville never see her much. That would be not a productive avenue.
INT: Was Jack Thatcher still around the Washington scene in these years?
WHA: Oh, Jack was around, and he had just retired, I can't remember when.
INT: Sixty-nine.
WHA: He was very much a gentleman about town and knew everybody.
INT: It seems like there was a great deal of integration between the Dumbarton Oaks collection at that time, or at least the administration, and the Washington social scene.
WHA: Dumbarton Oaks was very much a Georgetown social scene. There were very few people who had any real intellectual interest in what Dumbarton Oaks was doing. It was something of a mystery. I mean, first of all, garden history – people didn't know what – that was such a new discipline or sub-discipline. Byzantine studies, that was totally off the books, and the pre-Columbian was also, really. That beautiful collection, that jewel collection – too bad you didn't get to speak to the architect.
INT: Philip Johnson. He passed away, I think.
WHA: Oh, yes.
INT: Did you know him?
WHA: I did, just briefly, when we lived in New York, but through other connections that had nothing to do with Dumbarton Oaks.
INT: He did leave memoirs or something like that.
WHA: About Dumbarton Oaks? Oh, well then that's good.
INT: It's helpful.
WHA: And someone else that I knew who is still I think living is Louis Auchincloss, who's a novelist and lawyer who lives in New York, who's in his early 90s now.
INT: What was his connection to Dumbarton Oaks?
WHA: Well, he was a good friend of them. He would have been a much younger friend, but he would have known the Harvard-Dumbarton Oaks scene, and I remember him talking to me about how Harvard had somehow – whether his law firm or somebody that he was involved with – when the Blisses were persuaded to give Dumbarton Oaks to Harvard, and he was rather critical of that. And he felt that Harvard had pushed them into it and used the threat of the war, the possible "invasion" like the war of 1812 – they ought to have – that somehow Cambridge Massachusetts was going to be safer, to own the property would add more stability. This is what I recollect Louis telling me, whether there's any truth to it I have no idea. But that was inside gossip.
INT: Very helpful to have.
WHA: Mr. Kreeger was also on the board when I was on the board. Another name that you – he's long since gone, the businessman in Washington. Does his name –?
INT: I don't think we've heard anyone bring him up before.
WHA: Well, he was – they were great art collectors, and he was on the board of the corp., and he was involved in all kinds of positions around culturally, and I guess I knew him through being at the National Gallery and because of his collection. But Bill Tyler got him on the board because he was a Harvard graduate and could stand up to the pressure from Harvard, which – there was a sense of pressure, at least in that period; the rumor was that Harvard would be happy to close the whole thing down and take the all proceeds back to Cambridge.
INT: What was the gossip related to that? Because it seems so explicit in the Bliss will that that is not what they wanted.
WHA: They were very explicit about it, and Louis Auchincloss discussed that with me about that issue, but nevertheless –
INT: Harvard will be Harvard.
WHA: Everyone read Harvard's ambitions.
INT: Yes, I think they took material from the collection up to – was it the Fogg during this time?
WHA: Yes.
INT: And that was a very big thing.
WHA: Was that during the war, when they took it?
INT: They might have taken it during the war, and then I think again maybe in the early seventies?
WHA: They could have, I don't remember. And that was not a good idea, it made everyone very nervous. And then also the friction was over the way the money was redistributed. Harvard had its formula dealing with the Bliss bequest, the proceeds didn't come back to Dumbarton Oaks, they got a fixed percentage.
INT: Really? Where was the other money –?
WHA: It was overhead for Cambridge, as we understood it.
INT: Were these for the Dumbarton Oaks professorships?
WHA: Well, all the operating funds, Dumbarton's endowment went to Harvard, you see, they would distribute it, they earned 8% and Dumbarton Oaks got maybe 4% – I don't know that, I'm just saying, that was at least – and Kreeger, who was very much of a finance man on the board, was quite outspoken and critical if ever anyone from Harvard ever came down.
INT: Were there visits from Harvard?
WHA: Well, not very often. The dean of arts and science – he was a very powerful dean, I can't think of his name.
INT: Bok?
WHA: No, that's the president. Bok came I think once during my time, and when you think how many institutions Harvard has, the very idea that he might have even come once – but the dean who was very powerful, and I think he was dean of arts and sciences but I can't remember the names. But the problem at Dumbarton Oaks – Byzantines studies at Harvard, you obviously have a connection at Harvard, but the other two areas did not and do not, and that was always felt to be a weakness in the way the thing's structured, and that gave the Byzantinists – they were, you know, not equal among equals. But that's again part of the politics of the thing. But everyone understood all this.
INT: If we could go back for a second to your relationship to Mr. Whitehall.
WHA: Whitehill.
INT: Whitehill, excuse me. You mentioned he had talked to you a little bit about the Blisses, did he have any particular stories that you recall? We're very interested in –
WHA: Not that I can recall now. I might be able to if I reread his book, but I'm sure anything he told me in the kind of after-dinner, over-scotch conversation would have been in his book and so on. He loved the style of the Blisses in terms of the way they went about supporting music and the whole civilized, really European atmosphere that really prevailed, certainly in the seventies. There was nothing else in Washington that came near that, because of the scale of it, small, intimate. And the Sunday night concerts – you had to be invited, as if Mrs. Bliss was still presiding. So it was very much a – the rituals were all figured out, and certainly carried on, with Jack Thatcher in the wings criticizing if they weren't.
INT: He was also a godson, I think, of the Blisses. Or at the very least a friend.
WHA: Yeah, he probably was. I don't remember that. But there was very much this curatorial reverence and caretaking of the image of the Blisses and Dumbarton Oaks as the Blisses related to it. So you had ten years – Giles Constable, maybe his father, who taught at Harvard, in art history I believe, probably knew the Blisses, and there may have been something, a little nepotism there, I don't know. He surely must have talked about that.
INT: Yes. We didn't actually get to –
WHA: Do that one.
INT: Well, I wonder if you might talk a little bit more about the European feel. Was it – I assume you must have gotten to know some of the scholars there at the time.
WHA: Oh yes, I did. And there were always European scholars, and we did see them, made a point that they would meet at the National Gallery and there was an atmosphere. Whether that goes on now or not, I don't know.
INT: We haven't gotten the sense that there's as much interaction as you're talking about.
WHA: Interaction, no. At that period there was, on a very informal level.
INT: Who were the major players there as far as academics, as you recall
WHA: Oh, I can't remember now the names again. Betty MacDougal, of course, she was somewhat controversial as a director. She was not an easy person to get along with, and people had the impression that she really didn't want anybody coming in doing research other than the fellows. And that's fair enough to understand, that it was a limited facility and so on. There was a feeling she was not particularly friendly to scholars who were not – who had a legitimate reason – who were not [fellows]. That's just a rumor and an impression I had. I think Betty suffered from the fact that while she was an art history major, garden history itself was parvenu, and didn't have full credentials at Harvard, or certainly at the Fogg. You can understand that.
INT: Well, at that time Dumbarton Oaks was really the only center –
WHA: It was really the only center. There was – the scholarship going on – there was a good deal going on in England in garden history; it has its genesis I think really after the war. And lots of the fellows and people who came up and were influential read at some of the symposia at Dumbarton Oaks. They were all international figures but I think the English garden history crowd – they quite often were members of the symposia; you can read the lists and so on. The Byzantinists, not so much. Not in terms of such a specialized field of study, as you know. With garden history, people – even though they didn't understand what the discipline was about and how it worked in terms of the collection at Dumbarton Oaks – nevertheless people said, well, you know, I have a garden.
INT: Did you have much interaction with the collection at Dumbarton Oaks?
WHA: Well, I've used it, yes. The study that I did on the French garden, I used [it] quite extensively, of course. At that point I had curated an exhibition on Jefferson at the National Gallery called "The Eye of Thomas Jefferson;" my catalog you may know.
INT: Seventy-six.
WHA: In working on Jefferson I did become very much involved in eighteenth-century garden history, because of his travels and interests, when he was in France. And it was actually through that rather narrow avenue that – and I realized at that point that there wasn't a useful small volume – not a picture book, but a serious book on the history of the French garden. Which has now been translated into French and two or three other – which is interesting, you know. The French consider that an area that they – would not recognize an American scholar. Actually the French edition of that, they did really quite a beautiful job of it.
INT: Do you remember, during that time when you were interacting with it, what the state of the collection was? As you probably know, there still is no museum space for the garden collection.
WHA: No. And there wasn't any – the museum part of the garden, it was a literary collection. It was works on paper. We never ever thought of it as objects or related to anything other than just seeing it all make perfect sense. Which is the way the Blisses began the collection – what they bought and so on.
INT: So at this point it was mainly the library. Because I know at least over the years they've managed to collect some of the prints and paintings that the Blisses originally had, of gardens.
WHA: Of gardens?
INT: Of botanical gardens.
WHA: Is that in the garden studies section?
INT: That's my understanding. But it sounds like this was not at the time.
WHA: Well, there were things around in the hallways, hanging on the walls, but not in any sense as a part of the study collection.
INT: And in the early sixties things were in the garden library?
WHA: Yes. I didn't know it until sixty-nine, seventy. I'd been there but I never used the collection at that time. I guess Betty MacDougal was there at that time. There was also Alan Fern's wife, do you know her? Alan Fern was head of the prints and photographs at the Library of Congress, and then he became director of not the Portrait Gallery, but what we now call the National Collection, the American Collection. His wife was Betty MacDougal's assistant; she's in Washington. She's somebody. She was very much in the working – I knew her very well, but I can't think of her first name now. Mrs. Alan Fern. I suppose he's living in Washington; I haven't seen him in years. But it was very, very intimate and small; there would never be another person or scholar or anybody. The fellows would be in their little cubicles and I got to know some of them.
INT: Who was there, do you recall?
WHA: I'm hard pressed for names. They'd always be in, working on very interesting subjects, I remember.
INT: In your conversations with one another, did they tend to be about garden history, or the literary aspects, or theoretical? What was the tone at that time in the seventies in terms of the field itself, as you recall?
WHA: Mostly they came out of literature as well as art history, or they came out of history; it is a subdivision of history. And garden history wasn't taught anyplace – what was his name, the head of the garden there; he's English?
INT: John Dixon Hunt.
WHA: John Dixon Hunt. He's very prolific in writing; have you talked to him?
INT: Spoke with him on Monday.
WHA: I remember him very well when he was there; I think later he catalogued Mrs. Mellon's collection, or did two volumes on that collection, which is available to you. But I think that was after he was at – he's at Pennsylvania I think now. He was a very conspicuous art historian, but he came out of literature. Interesting sort of background. My background is law.
INT: How did you get –?
WHA: Well, I don't know.
INT: We talked a little earlier about your time at the National Gallery. I wonder if you remember from that experience what the relationship was like between the National Gallery, specifically, and Dumbarton Oaks; you talked a little bit generally about the close interactions between the institutions.
WHA: Well, of course, John Walker – I was there briefly when he was just retiring. I came in with the idea that Carter would become the director and I was to pick up what Carter was doing, which I did, but that overlaps a bit. But certainly the Walkers were the connection with the Blisses, an intimate part of that circle. Those were the two major international cultural institutions in Washington – I mean in the humanities, or art, not the sciences, but I can't think of any – they were preeminent. No university had international stature in Washington during those years, true? And being both non-political institutions. Those were the two places European visitors would gravitate to, one or both, whatever. And certainly the Blisses were looked upon as major figures and made famous by the Dumbarton Oaks conference, the commissioning of Stravinsky. That was a big time. And far more sophisticated than Washingtonians on a day-to-day basis ever thought of themselves being. Washington then is no different than Washington now, I'm sure, just more people.
INT: It seems like there was a very practical relationship between the two institutions as well, because even when you did the Jefferson exhibit, Dumbarton Oaks I think lent books for that.
WHA: Yes, they loaned things. We had a close working – anything either would need, we were equals.
INT: So you got the sense that during that period Dumbarton Oaks was very generous in lending out the collection.
WHA: Oh, yes, absolutely.
INT: Because we've heard different things over different periods.
WHA: Well, it depends on what department they were. There was a special – we used to speak of our special relationship with Great Britain. There was a special relationship with Dumbarton Oaks. Both institutions were sort of latecomers; the National Gallery didn't open until 1940. The same time as the Blisses, isn't that true?
INT: Yes, the gift was in forty.
WHA: Were they living in Washington? He'd been in diplomatic service.
INT: They were living at Dumbarton Oaks briefly, but it was for really only about five years, I think, before the gift, and I think the museum and collection and center didn't really open until forty-six.
WHA: Forty-six? Well, they were putting up all those Renaissance ceilings. Is the ceiling still there?
INT: And it's been beautifully recently cleaned and renovated and reopened.
WHA: I've often wondered how much of that ceiling is original. I never saw a Renaissance ceiling in Italy that big. It's huge.
INT: But it is lovely.
WHA: It is lovely.
INT: One thing we've also touched on, but I think haven't talked about directly, is of course you got to know Giles Constable very well. He's known now I think as a bit of a controversial director.
WHA: Is he? I don't know what the controversy would be or what it was.
INT: There wasn't a sense of that immediately when you were there?
WHA: Well, Giles – I didn't know him that well. I don't think Giles was an easy person to know as a personality. He's a scholar. I think the Institute was a perfect place for him. I don't know that he was particularly comfortable with administration. That was an area I don't know anything about. That's just my outside/inside reading.
INT: He must have seemed a very different director than Bill Tyler.
WHA: Oh, yes, Bill was a preeminently new administration, the skills of diplomacy. Everything was protocolé, as Mrs. Tyler used to say. And again the foreign service was involved in all the diplomatic – and that played into the diplomatic scene, which should be mentioned, certainly in the seventies, when the diplomatic corps in Washington I think was much more conspicuous and ambassadors played much bigger roles than they do now, with electronics and all the things that have changed their lives and everybody else's. But then the diplomatic corps was very protocolé as who was senior, and they didn't change a lot, and the British ambassador was always – even though he wasn't number one in the pecking order – he was always very much number one on the social scene, and he was usually somebody new, because Washington was always a prime plum slot. But to give you the sense of that, the diplomatic corps really gave the scene around Washington an international feeling. Certainly we were aware of this at the National Gallery because the embassies – we were always being asked for this or that, not loans and so on but just to play some sort of a political role in who was coming to visit, heads of state or the Queen of England or whatever and so on. We had a very close regular relationship with the diplomatic corps. But just take, for instance, the senior diplomat, when we lived in Washington, was the Italian ambassador, and his name was Ambassador Ortona, and he'd been there longer than any other, he'd been through the war; his memory of Washington in terms of diplomacy was extraordinary. But those figures very much were part of the Dumbarton Oaks scene and they were people who knew what Dumbarton Oaks was and what its function was and so on. And that was very important. You usually found the European diplomatic corps in Washington was always of a very high caliber, so you can see how they fitted into the Blisses' idea of this European salon, which is really what it was. And the salon was Mrs. Bliss and Mrs. Bacon and Mrs. Beale, and they did run them; those houses were big enough, and certainly Mrs. Bacon was the only one still operating when we – and somehow we made her list so went there quite often so we got some sense of what must have been the same thing at the Blisses' – when they were actually living in the house – in terms of the way the dinner parties were given and the circle that brought them together. None of that exists anymore in Washington – nothing like that, as far as I know.
INT: We've read how one of the things that Mr. Bliss had promised Mrs. Bliss if she would come to Washington was that he would create this sense of a country estate in the city, and of course then the gardens are a tremendous part of that. And I wondered, as a specialist, just for our records, how do you see the gardens themselves at Dumbarton Oaks as they sit in terms of their importance as an American garden or the uniqueness or not and just to touch upon that.
WHA: They are very important, and Beatrix Farrand was very, very important in that whole period, one of the real stars, and the close relationship she had with her patron Mildred Bliss was very important. And she was encouraged to do things that were really extraordinary in terms of the way the whole layout was done and how they worked it out. It was a country estate and in fact the house obviously was a country estate when Georgetown was first founded. I don't know how large it was in the early – again Walter Muir Whitehill I think gives a good history. I was ex-official trustee of the National Trust when I was at the National Gallery, but then I was also on the board of Monticello, of which Walter had been on for long before I went on, and was very much involved in. He was one of the founders of the National Trust, so historic preservation was a part of this whole cultivated cultural scene that was led by people like that, and they all knew each other there, or seemed to. Does this give you any sense of the texture? And I really want to emphasize that the '70s were a transition in Washington culturally, politically, and certainly from Dumbarton Oaks' standpoint.
INT: So people were leaving Washington, or it was just a different generation?
WHA: Just a different [generation]. The atmosphere changes, the power center seemed to shift. Washington always changes. That's another whole big subject, we won't go there.
INT: Oh, well, I wonder – probably should have gotten to this a little bit earlier: just for our institutional history, you were a member I think both of the senior fellows committee for garden studies and for the advisory board, and I wonder if you might talk a little about the differences and maybe even the relationship between the two.
WHA: In my earlier comments I overlapped, I really wasn't making much of a chain. The garden program really was not too active as I remember. It was pretty much Betty's. She was running it that way; the conferences were her contribution. Speaking of the conferences, I mentioned – she was a very important senior fellow, a scholar – the archaeology/classicist Wilhelmina Jashemski, and she was the leading scholar on the gardens at Pompeii, of all things. She certainly is an international figure, recognized in her field. In fact Mary Beard, who's at Cambridge – who has a blog by the way.
INT: Yes, she does. I haven't met her, but she's come to our Cambridge a couple times.
WHA: Well, I've been in touch with her because I'm working on a book, which I managed to get a couple suggestions on, some ideas. She's been very generous and very funny. Her blog is called "A Don's Life;" she's a don, and she's a brilliant classicist and just gave the lectures at California – what are they called, the famous lectures, out there at Berkeley?
INT: Sather?
WHA: And those lectures are now online. You can hear her; it's really quite wonderful, there are three of them, they're marvelous, you can put them on your iPod. But Mary Beard, within the last few – I glance at her blog, and a lot of the time it's things I have no interest in, and she writes on a lot of things, not about the classics or anything else, but another thing. She'll really turn up some very interesting – in fact, I cite her in a footnote from her blog, which I thought she will enjoy. Her motto is "bloggo ergo sum". Anyway –
INT: She was never at –?
WHA: Oh no, but she did mention – I think Wilhelmina died or something came up – and she mentioned something in her blog because she knew everyone – and I was so delighted she did. I sent her an email, we've just been in touch basically by email.
INT: So she really was a figure from an international –
WHA: You mean Wilhemina? Yes, in fact, I helped her get this published; she had real trouble getting it published, you can imagine, and I'm sure it's wildly expensive now. But she had a technique; she was particularly interested in biological archaeology, and there was somebody at the Smithsonian that worked with her in terms of identifying plant material, spores, and seeds and all that, and this was really a pioneer work that goes beyond – not a part of Dumbarton Oaks, but nevertheless to me her connection with Dumbarton Oaks was extremely important.
INT: What was your fondest memory or the most exciting project that you were a part of in terms of your time?
WHA: Oh, I don't know about that. I think the music programs were great, which had nothing to do with anything else other than just the pleasure of it. The quality of the music program was so high.
INT: Was this the Friends of Music program?
WHA: It wasn't called Friends of Music then, it was Mrs. Bliss's musicale.
INT: We were told that there was a dress code for these, that if a fellow were to come underdressed –
WHA: Oh yes, absolutely. Oh, there's no dress code now. But there surely must be at the concert? No. Well, it was on my invitation in those days and everybody knew everybody else, and Virginia Bacon would be sitting on the front row and she would be asleep in the first five minutes after whatever they were playing, snoring.
INT: That still happens!
INT: But a lot of the Blisses' personal staff stayed on.
WHA: Were still around. I don't know that the butler was, but he might have been. Wait a minute: somebody used to bring us sherry at the end of board meetings.
INT: We spoke with Tony and Silvia.
WHA: And the gardener, the head gardener was there.
INT: Don Smith.
WHA: Is he still extant?
INT: Yes.
WHA: So you've talked to him.
INT: Well, he's up in Maine, and they're going to go up and speak with him.
WHA: I think that's extremely important. I would put him high, put him above Giles – no, not for the record!
INT: We spoke with his son, who of course grew up on the grounds in the gardener's cottage, and that was very helpful.
WHA: Yes, and that would be another point of view, another level, of course.
INT: And he was interviewed, I think in ninety-three, it must have been, about the time he retired, just because of course he was such a figure that someone wanted to get his thoughts together, but we would like to talk to him. We haven't heard though that he was Bliss staff.
WHA: Who, Don? He was not? I thought he was on the staff, but I don't know that. You know, again, could be just loosely referred to.
INT: We've heard of an Antonio who was there, who was I guess Mr. Thacher's butler. I don't know that he ever worked for the Blisses, though.
WHA: No. And I think that's probably the one I would have seen.
INT: Alfredo.
INT: Oh, yes, I'm sorry, Alfredo. And Mrs. Aston, who was there in the library. She was rumored to be Bliss staff originally.
WHA: No. She was only very unhappy. But unhappiness was not unusual at Dumbarton Oaks.
INT: We've heard she was a very stiff British enforcer of the dress code.
WHA: Oh yes, she was. But she would somehow unburden herself to me, for reasons I had no idea. Yes, of course. But I knew her; she was probably a neighbor, and I don't really know – she was in a funny way sort of misplaced there; she wasn't a scholar, and I wasn't sure what her role really was.
INT: Our understanding is that she was in charge of the Princeton Index in the library.
WHA: The Index? Yes, it was something like that probably. And there was always particularly friction –
INT: In the library?
WHA: In the library.
INT: We've heard it was sort of a tumultuous time there, and that the staff dwindled down in the library to the point that –
WHA: Oh yes, there was just maybe one person, and there was curatorial work to be done in the rare book collection and prints.
INT: There was a rare book collection at that time? Because we've heard conflicting things really about the formality of that.
WHA: Well, is it not there, the rare book room?
INT: Oh yes, now of course, but we've heard in those days – we talked to Henry and Eunice Maguire, Byzantine fellows at the time, and they would talk about pulling – this was a little bit later, when Irene Vaslef came to the library, when she was head librarian – but they talked a lot about the course of the library with the main house; they've talked about pulling these seventeenth- and eighteenth-century books off the shelf and taking them I think either to Irene or to Seka Allen, who was also in the library, and that was the beginning of the rare books collection as we understood it, at least for Byzantine.
WHA: Oh, that's in the Byzantine.
INT: It must have been different for garden.
WHA: Oh yes, totally different. We never went there.
INT: How was the interaction between the programs?
WHA: Oh, absolutely none. Absolutely none. We never even knew where they were. You were talking about the sculpture being put in the garden or something – the thing that really stirred Georgetown up when I was involved there was the plan to build library facilities under the lawn, did you know about this?
INT: No.
WHA: Well this was a whole big –
INT: The North Vista? Yes.
WHA: Yes, and it was going to go – it meant removing one of the trees that had been there even going back before the Blisses, and it was going to be buried under that – what direction are we? North?
INT: Mm-hmm.
WHA: North. The North Vista. And people began to realize how much havoc was going to be wrought, digging this all up and supposedly putting it back. Hugh Jacobson, an architect and an old friend of mine in Princeton, was the architect for it. And I'm sure his plans – you want to talk to Hugh, because he ran into a real buzz saw over this, and he was a good friend of mine but I had grave reservations about the whole thing myself. I didn't feel it was going to go anywhere, so I wasn't carrying posters and picketing the place, but the feeling ran very, very high and it really had to do with the integrity of the grounds, just as simple as that. There would have been some irreparable changes if it had gone through.
INT: Were there any other major – you must have heard about the major projects going on at Dumbarton Oaks on the advisory board. Do you recall any other major projects or controversies or just discussions?
WHA: Oh, I can't think of anything. That one, of course, the extension, it had moved beyond the rumor stage, and the rumors were already pretty horrific around Georgetown, gossip and so on, as to what they were going to do. There were no published plans at the early stage, and I don't know if there ever were. And I think Giles – I think this comes under his – and it had to do with building facilities really for the Byzantinists, because the garden library wasn't growing all that fast. I don't even know now what the size of it is.
INT: I don't know now. I know that – we looked a little bit into the library in the early '70s in our research and it was something like two thousand volumes added in a year for the Byzantine collection and maybe three hundred for the garden.
WHA: Three hundred, yeah. Well, it also has to do with the level of scholarship and so on.
INT: As long as we're talking about the neighborhood, just very briefly, it's interesting because we've talked about, of course, the great ties between Washington social scene and Dumbarton Oaks at the time. But also the controversy really, and hopefully you can speak to this since you were living on P Street, between the immediate neighborhood and Dumbarton Oaks. We've heard things before, particularly about Elizabeth Taylor when she was living in the house on S street.
WHA: On S street?
INT: Senator Warner's house.
WHA: Oh, John Warner's house. But that didn't last very long, though. What was more dramatic was when Johnson appointed the neighbor to the Supreme Court – who am I talking about?, the lawyer in Washington. They lived right on R, just on the next block across the street from Dumbarton Oaks. Oh, famous lawyer, and he had to resign from the Supreme Court but there was some –
INT: Oh, he resigned – this isn't Bork, is it?
WHA: Oh no no, who never made it to the court. No, this is a famous lawyer. And the press was all up there because – and I remember going up to Dumbarton Oaks for something and the press was all around his house and a streaker came down our street because the press was all there. This was the 1970s.
INT: Oh yes, we've heard very many –
WHA: And Elizabeth Taylor, they were really basically I think out in Middleburg.
INT: Oh, really. I know she didn't like Dumbarton Oaks, you know, the gardeners being about and noisy in the morning.
WHA: Oh, that part I know nothing about; never heard anything about it. I can imagine.
INT: But were the neighbors sort of cantankerous with the center being so close?
WHA: I've never really heard anything. You know, being in Georgetown you usually heard those things. No, I think – Dumbarton Oaks kept up – obviously, because of the background of the place, they were very sensitive to its good neighbors' relationships. Giles can speak to that much better because he would get the letters and the telephone calls or whatever. It's too bad you didn't get to speak to Tom Bayard. He was very young, younger than I, and he was very, very like Bill Tyler; he was very, very protective of the Dumbarton Oaks mystique, or the Bliss mystique if you want to call it that, and I remember the first time I was up to see him, because we had mutual friends at Princeton, he said, do you want to see my office. I said, yes, where is it? He said, it's in Mildred Bliss's bedroom. Is that still used as an office?
INT: It is. It's no longer – I'm not entirely sure if Financial is up there –
WHA: Is Financial in the office now? In the bedroom? They haven't changed anything. This was very much looking like her bedroom.
INT: Really? Did you get the sense that it really was a house?
WHA: Oh yes, that part was. I was very interested in that part of it and how the Blisses expanded it, and all that's well-known, but I remember Tom taking me around, showing me all the expansion, the drawing room; they really did the whole – talk about a makeover. Big-time. When you see the original pictures of Dumbarton Oaks, that whole facade I think is new, on the south. I'm sure that's true. You can, if you know the original plans, figure out what they did, but all the grandeur really was brought in by the Bliss hallway and the staircase and all that.
INT: It's still very lovely.
WHA: It's beautiful, isn't it. What do those rooms get used for, the drawing room, anything much?
INT: There's the director of studies' office.
WHA: But the director's office is in that section, but I always thought that was a former utility room or something.
INT: I'm honestly not certain what some of those places used to do. I know when they renovated and they redid the museum and everything some of that must have changed. Because of course the building of the whole library changed everything.
WHA: It's amazing how dark it is. We're going to have to light a candle. Do you need a light?
INT: Oh, we're fine. I just want to make sure I haven't left anything out. You've done quite a good job of answering our questions without our asking them. I wonder if – we've asked a little about the beginning of garden studies, but has Dumbarton Oaks played an important role in the development and progression of it?
WHA: I think that's a very important question. Through its international program, through its fellows it certainly played a – in terms of giving scholars – a base. I never thought the collection was adequate as a real scholarly – when people would say to me, somebody would say, I'm going to apply to Dumbarton Oaks for a junior fellowship, I would say, have you looked at the collection first? Do you know whether it serves your purpose, or what other collections there are in greater Washington, if you look at the larger scene? But in terms of garden history, there was not a lot of energy behind building a larger collection. Excuse me just a moment. It's such an important question. I never thought that they pushed to really establish a base at Harvard. Betty went up there and taught and she was very unhappy, and I think she left after a year, was that right?
INT: I'm not really sure of the exact timing, but I've heard that.
WHA: After she had retired, or left Dumbarton Oaks. It should have been something they were taking a major leadership role, either at Harvard or someplace else, and as far as I know they played no role in the development, say, that John Dixon Hunt has done at the University of Pennsylvania. That's just larger because of his energy, but he's singular in the sense that there's not any others I can think of. Unlike the scene in England, where garden history has a much larger network and resources. Also garden history is built into the whole culture of Great Britain; it's part of their personality, and they see that. Gardening not only at every level, even at the academic; when you think of the great physical artifacts of gardens, the great Royal Gardens are in England, some of them, and it goes back three hundred years. So you can understand why – and we don't have anything like that, and there really isn't, in my opinion, an indigenous American garden style. Not that this had anything to do with Dumbarton Oaks but I'm just saying that we're no different from Byzantine studies. True?
INT: Absolutely.
WHA: But I never felt that Dumbarton Oaks took the leadership that it might have, professional leadership in terms of helping to build up any comparable academic programs. That may not be a factor.
INT: Do they exist now, or is this still a field that's developing?
WHA: I don't know; I'm out of touch with a lot of what's going on now. But just in looking over journals and things – I've given my own garden history library away, I don't have it here now; it was in another building here. It was a working library solely. I gave it to the Nelson Gallery in Kansas City, because my family comes from there. I felt again there were no real resources for anyone interested in the subject in that part of the world. And there aren't. But I'm just saying Dumbarton Oaks never really saw its role, and there may be a lot of reasons, a lot of political reasons, academic reasons in terms of Harvard. But it seems to me they could have done more. The garden conferences, are they still going on?
INT: Yes.
WHA: I used to get the programs regularly, but I didn't attend them. I thought the subject matter had gotten somewhat off the track; just looking at it over-all, there wasn't enough interest for me, but that's just a personal point of view. The real quality of it, I don't know.
INT: Well, I think you've answered most of our questions. I wonder, unless there's anything that we've left out that you can think of –
WHA: No, I think your last question is one I haven't said enough, but I've just put in my two cents.
INT: I wonder if in closing if you might talk a little bit about what you see, especially from your position as a person in Georgetown in the earlier days of Dumbarton Oaks, what the Bliss and the Farrand legacies are for Dumbarton Oaks.
WHA: Well, the institution itself is obviously their great legacy and I don't know what one could say beyond that. I didn't know either the Blisses or Beatrix Farrand – at least her work is a physical document that is studied periodically, and worried over in terms of its conservation and so on, and that's alive in that sense, and there's a great deal of academic interest and so on quite apart from the public interest. I don't know if the Blisses are fading. I doubt if anybody other than – I think it's so important institutionally to do what you're doing, for a lot of reasons, though I don't know who or how it will be made available.
INT: It will be placed in the Archives.
WHA: In the Archives? But I've been on a number of boards and I've always felt that when board-members come on, they usually have so little historical perception of an institution, just because of the nature – by the time they go off the board it's too late, and with rotating boards and so on. So I think that having this institutional history is very important; how it's disseminated or how it can be boiled down and useful, I have no idea. It seems to me there ought to be something that could go into a kind of handbook for directors and staff and any board functionaries – seems to me that would be important. Doesn't have to be published but it certainly would be something that would be – because otherwise the Blisses are fading. I doubt the staff has any idea now. Is that true?
INT: For the most part. Dumbarton Oaks did found an Archives I guess in the eighties or around that time. So there has been some formal attempt to collect what they call "Blissiana."
WHA: Blissiana?
INT: Yes. I've just noticed, and we work a lot with the Archives, that directors of study will come down for each of the programs quite a bit and take folders. The most major players, I think. There's an attempt to look back, but whether everyone else at Dumbarton Oaks does, I don't know.
WHA: No, of course not. Beatrix Farrand is a major figure unto herself, obviously, and her collection should have been there. But nothing can be done about that. Maybe copies of all of her papers should be part of – it seems to me that would be just the normal, natural thing.
INT: Thank you so much, you've been very helpful.]]>
Patrick Andrist, Université de Fribourg
Byzantine Studies
"Critical Edition with Commentary of the Dialogue of Athanasius and Zacchaeus"
Massimo Bernabò, Università degli Studi di Pavia
Byzantine Studies
"The Illustrations of the Arabic Gospels of Infancy (Firenze, Biblioteca Laurenziana cod. Orientale 387)"
Matthew Briel, Fordham University
Byzantine Studies
"Translation and Commentary of George-Gennadios Scholarios's Tracts on Predetermination"
Duncan Campbell, Australian National University
Garden and Landscape Studies
"The Dumbarton Oaks Anthology of Chinese Garden Literature"
Lori Diel, Texas Christian University
Pre-Columbian Studies
"The Codex Mexicanus on the Mexica of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco"
Krzysztof Domzalski, Polska Akademia Nauk
Byzantine Studies
"A New Look at the History and Material Culture of the Pontic Region in the Early Byzantine Period: The Evidence of Fine Pottery"
Wolfram Drews, Universität Münster Historisches Seminar
Byzantine Studies
"Christians Beyond the Border: An Item on the Agenda of Byzantine Emperors?"
Heather Hunter Crawley, University of Bristol
Byzantine Studies
"A Sensory Archaeology of the Riha Hoard"
Robert Kitchen, Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Byzantine Studies
"Ethiopian Monastic Translation: Dadisho Qatraya from Syriac to Ge'ez"
Cynthia Kristan-Graham, Auburn University
Pre-Columbian Studies
"A Marketplace of Ideas at Chichén Itzá: The Mercado and the Group of the Thousand Columns"
Elisa Mandell, California State University–Fullerton
Pre-Columbian Studies
"Representing Death and Decomposition in Costa Rican Funerary Masks"
Naama Meishar, The Hebrew University
Garden and Landscape Studies
"Politics and Ethics in Landscape Architecture: Spacing, Expression, and Representation in Jaffa's Slope Park"
Miranda Mollendorf, Harvard University
Garden and Landscape Studies
"The World in a Book: Robert John Thornton's Temple of Flora (1799–1812)"
Katherine Rinne, California College of the Arts
Garden and Landscape Studies
"The Source of the Soul: Water for Villa Waterworks in Renaissance Rome"
Erick Rochette, The Pennsylvania State University
Pre-Columbian Studies
"The Price of Prestige: Examining Classic Maya Jade Artifact Use and Economic Organization"
Terre Ryan, Loyola University Maryland
Garden and Landscape Studies
"Setting Liberty's Table"
Manuela Studer-Karlen, Université de Fribourg
Byzantine Studies
"Byzantine Church Iconographic Programs and the Liturgy: The Case of Christ Anapeson"
Jeffrey Walker, University of Texas–Austin
Byzantine Studies
"Joseph Rhakendytes' Synopsis of Rhetoric: Translation and Commentary"
Martin Wallraff, Universität Basel
Byzantine Studies
"The Canon Tables of the Gospels by Eusebius of Caesarea (Fourth Century): Critical Edition and Commentary"
Xiangpin Zhou, Tongji University
Garden and Landscape Studies
"An Imagination of the Chinese Shangri-La in a Western Way: Zhang Garden in Shanghai (1882–1918)"
Organized by Dorothée Imbert, the symposium provided a critical historical framework for today's urban agriculture by discussing the multiple scales, ideologies, and contexts of productive landscapes, from allotment gardens to regional plans. Topics included the production and distribution of food in relation to human settlement and urban form, from German Siedlungen to Italian Fascist new towns, and Israeli kibbutzim to contemporary Tokyo. The conference placed particular emphasis on the efforts of modern and early-modern landscape architects, garden designers, and architects/planners to reconcile the demands of feeding cities and regions with the exigencies of urban expansion.]]>
Cloud Terrace takes the form of a hand-sculpted wire mesh cloud suspended over the Arbor Terrace and embellished with 10,000 Swarovski elements water-drop crystals mirrored in a reflecting pool.
The Arbor Terrace is one of the most modified spaces in the Dumbarton Oaks Gardens. Originally designed by Beatrix Farrand in the early 1930s as a simple rectangular herb garden, bordered on the west by a wisteria-covered arbor and on the east and north by a hedge of Kieffer pears, it was refashioned by Farrand's former associate Ruth Havey in the 1950s as a pot garden centered on a Rococo-style parterre with low, Doria stone parapet walls. The space can be hot and bright; Cao | Perrot's installation is a response to these conditions, extending the shade of the arbor across the terrace and animating the space inside the parterre with an oval pool surrounded by bluestone pebbles.
Cao | Perrot studio have a stunning list of projects to their credit, including temporary site-specific installations at the American Academy in Rome, the Potager du Roi, Versailles, the Tuileries, Paris, the Medici Fountain in the Luxembourg Gardens, and many of the world's leading garden festivals. Cao | Perrot studio are also responsible for the winning design of the 600-acre Guangming New Town Central Park in Shenzhen, China, a collaboration with Lee + Mundwiler Architects, which received an AIA 2009 National Honor Award for Urban Design. For more information on the artists, please visit www.caoperrotstudio.com.
The installation was organized by John Beardsley, Director of Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, and Gail Griffin, Director of Gardens, with the particular assistance of staff members Jane Padelford and Walter Howell. It is the third in a series of contemporary art installations at Dumbarton Oaks, following projects by Charles Simonds in 2009 and Patrick Dougherty in 2010. The series is intended to provide fresh interpretations and experiences of the Gardens and art collections of Dumbarton Oaks. The project was built with the assistance of twenty-six volunteers and supported by Swarovski Elements, who provided the crystals used for the installation.]]>
Allen Grieco (PhD École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) is Lila Acheson Wallace Assistant Director of Gardens and Grounds & Scholarly Programs as well as Senior Research Associate in History at Villa I Tatti (The Harvard University Centre for Italian Renaissance Studies). In April 2012 he was Visiting Scholar in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks.
Dr. Grieco has published extensively on the cultural history of food in Italy from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries and co-edited several collective volumes, amongst which are Food Excesses and Constraints in Europe, special issue of Food & History (2006), Dalla vite al vino. Fonti e problemi della vitivinicultura italiana nel medioevo (Bologna, 1994), and Le Monde végétal (XIIe–XVIIe siècles): savoirs et usages sociaux (Vincennes, 1993). Currently co-editor-in-chief of Food & History (Turnhout, Brepols), he is also in charge of a bibliographic project on the history of food in Europe funded by the Mellon Foundation and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. He has taught at Harvard, Florence, and Bologna, and has created an English-language graduate program at the Università delle Scienze Gastronomiche, Pollenzo (Italy).
I have been at I Tatti for 23 years, where I spend about half my time overseeing the gardens and grounds. These include not only the gardens proper (7 acres) but also a surrounding agricultural landscape of about 66 acres that includes olives and vines. Careful management requires making historically-informed decisions regarding maintenance and restoration in order to ensure that the original character of the landscape is respected, even as it is allowed to evolve. So from both a practical and a scholarly point of view, it is essential to understand the history of the site as it was designed through the collaboration of the patrons with their landscape architect and architect.
The villa was acquired by Bernard and Mary Berenson in 1901 and bequeathed to Harvard University in 1960. An existing farmhouse was redesigned by the architect Geoffrey Scott as the Berenson residence, and Bernard Berenson's friend and associate Cecil Pinsent began work on the gardens in 1909. Construction progressed through several phases, was interrupted by World War I, and then completed in 1919–25.
Over the years I have been able to piece together through various sources the general evolution of the gardens. My initial interest in Pinsent's work grew out of this practical need to understand the history of I Tatti, but it has expanded to include Pinsent's career as a whole. I am particularly interested in how I Tatti, his first major garden, fits into his larger body of work.
The holdings at I Tatti have provided insights into certain phases of gardens' construction, with glimpses of Pinsent's conversations with the Berensons, particularly with Mary, through correspondence, as well as some preserved building permits that help document construction. There is also a collection of historical photographs that show the state of the gardens, as well as the larger site, during the various phases of construction. However, we are at a great disadvantage in reconstructing this history because Pinsent burned the vast majority of his papers and drawings before he died.
My research at Dumbarton Oaks focuses not so much on Pinsent's work at I Tatti, but rather on the contextualization of his design approach within the broader world of landscape architecture during the early twentieth century. For this purpose, the library's holdings have been especially helpful because of their depth—not only in early twentieth-century monographs on garden design but also in garden and design periodicals of that period. It is this broader view that I have had difficulty constructing elsewhere and that the time here at Dumbarton Oaks has been so useful in addressing.
I plan to publish this research as a series of articles on the gardens of I Tatti, or perhaps as a monograph on Pinsent's work as a whole. As significant as Pinsent was in his time, and especially given his prolific output, it is curious that he has been largely ignored by scholars. He began to attract some notice in the 1980s, and there have been a few articles and one conference on him since that time, but much of the discussion has been anecdotal rather than analytic and interpretive. I am hoping to draw attention to Pinsent's qualities as a designer, and to reassess his significance for early twentieth-century landscape architecture.]]>
The Plant Book for Dumbarton Oaks was prepared as a resource for those charged with maintenance of the gardens following their acquisition by Harvard University in 1941. Beatrix Farrand here explains the reasoning behind her plan for each of the gardens and stipulates how each should be cared for in order that its basic character remain intact. Her resourceful suggestions for alternative plantings, her rigorous strictures concerning pruning and replacement, her exposition of the overall concept that underlies each detail, and the plant lists that accompany her discussion of each garden make this a volume of interest to every student, practitioner, and lover of landscape design.]]>
"Behind Newcomb's scholarly references is a genuine love of subject." The Garden Club of America
Using the evidence of written documents, seed and plant lists, cataloges, and illustrations, the author attempts to show which annuals were popular and how they were used in the fifty-year period following the Civil War. Several commercial seed lists are reproduced to document the changing styles of gardening.]]>